On modernist poetics and poetology of walking: R. M. Rilke, R. Walser, Th. Bernhard, P. Handke

The paper examines walking as a subject of representation and reflection in German modernist literature. It analyzes fiction by Swiss and Austrian writers (R. M. Rilke, R. Walser, Th. Bernhard, P. Handke). This cultural practice is considered from several points of view: as a form of a modern person idling, a literary topic, a narrative model, a form of modernist poetology. The choice of subject matter is determined by cultural, historical-literary and style factors. The imagery of walking and wandering has had a long tradition in literature of the Alpine region (the so called "Alpen-Literatur"), being revised in the 20th century by modernist writers, who preserved but deconstructed its key topics. Poetics of the writers under research has some common features: a focus on search for the self, subordination of principles of composition to informal logics of the narrating I, lack of plotting, reduction of the objective world, preference for abstract vocabulary, inclusion of references to abstract art (avant-guard paintings and graphics, atonal music). This research aims to reveal genetic, typological and unique (national, author's) features of modernist poetics and poetology of walking. The following features of the modernist poetics of walking have been identified: the domination of aesthetic issues over the pragmatics of movement in space, prevalence of the imagined landscape over real, replacement of topography and close interconnection of walking and writing. In the modernist prose, thus, a walking person is a professional writer, and a ramble submits to intentions to compose a text about the walk.