Wasting Neither Space Nor Time: Robert Walser's Perambulatory Prose in the Wake of Modern Transportation Technology

ABSTRACT: Robert Walser, the early twentieth-century Swiss writer known for his many short prose texts about walking, can be easily read as a critic of modern technology. His preference for walking is implicitly, and often explicitly, opposed to the forms of mechanized transportation that are available to him. In contrast, this article argues that Walser's walks are in fact structured by the very forms of technology he purports to oppose. Far from a retreat from modern technology, these walks and the innovative prose works that recount them are made possible by the reconfiguration of space and time caused by the invention of rail travel.