Modernist perambulations:
Walking through time and space in modern and contemporary texts

Professor Anne Fuchs FBA MRIA

Thursday 19 May 2016, 6-7.15pm, followed by a reception
The British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH

Chaired by: Professor Ann Jefferson FBA, University of Oxford and Paris Institute of Advanced Studies

Modernity celebrated speed as the motor of progress and a source of pleasure unleashing vitality and energy. But speed also provoked a new desire for slowness to allow modern selves to cope with the frantic pace of transformation. Hence the emergence of the modern walker who, for example, strays through texts by Benjamin, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Thomas Mann and Robert Walser. Focusing on diverse types of walking such as urban perambulations, rural rambling, disorientated straying, imprisoned crawling and condemned walking, my lecture examines the aesthetic and moral implications of perambulating through time and space.