Now updated with a new preface, The Railway Journey is an invaluable resource for readers interested in nineteenth-century culture and technology and the prehistory of modern media and digitalization. As a history of the surprising ways in which technology and culture interact, this book covers a wide range of topics, including the changing perception of landscapes, the death of conversation while traveling, the problematic nature of the railway compartment, the space of glass architecture, the pathology of the railway journey, industrial fatigue and the history of shock, and the railroad and the city.īelonging to a distinguished European tradition of critical sociology best exemplified by the work of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, The Railway Journey is anchored in rich empirical data and full of striking insights about railway travel, the industrial revolution, and technological change. In a highly original and engaging fashion, Schivelbusch discusses the ways in which our perceptions of distance, time, autonomy, speed, and risk were altered by railway travel. In The Railway Journey, Schivelbusch examines the origins of this industrialized consciousness by exploring the reaction in the nineteenth century to the first dramatic avatar of technological change, the railroad. But this was not always the case as Wolfgang Schivelbusch points out in this fascinating study, our adaptation to technological changethe development of our modern, industrialized consciousnesswas very much a learned behavior. 'As communications and computer technology grow in power, the notion of place will be fundamentally altered.The impact of constant technological change upon our perception of the world is so pervasive as to have become a commonplace of modern society. Bruce Mazlish argues that contemporary flaneurs are to be found on board aeroplanes. It is within this context that I want to suggest that the railway network remains an important location for literature's engagement with the modern world. Third, he is both an observer of that modernity and a commodified participant in its market place, and as such remains in a liminal position, in a situation of existential uncertainty. Second, he moves through a landscape of modernity-a landscape that can but does not have to be the city. First, the flaneur is a figure of discourse, perhaps more so than an element of social reality. The essays in Tester's volume suggest three central features of the flaneur as a durable phenomenon of modernity. In Tester's volume, the flaneur is relocated in the contemporary worlds of gastronomy, shopping malls, and intellectual game-playing, and presented as a mythological ideal type. Through such reinvention, the idea of the flaneur has proved more resilient than the mode of modernity in which he first developed. Walter Benjamin, picking through the remnants of a modernity grown old, used the figure of the flaneur to help define his own role as writer and cultural critic. 'In observing Paris, the flaneur is looking at nothing other than the current expression of modernity. Although specific to a Parisian time and place, the flaneur is used as a figure to illuminate issues of city life irrespective of time and place. Tester points to the ambiguity that surrounds the historical specificity of the flaneur. This is borne out by a collection of essays on the figure published in 1994, edited by Keith Tester. (1) Schivelbusch's is not the only valediction to the flaneur, but, as often as the flaneur may be pronounced dead, he (or she) returns in a different guise. ![]() With the coming of the railway age, the flaneur could be no more. The railway passenger can usefully be read as a reinvention of the flaneur, as the works explore the potential of the (literary) imagination within technologically driven historical processes and the rationalizing networks of modernity.Ĭoncluding his study of how the railway industrialized the experience of space and time in the nineteenth century, Wolfgang Schivelbusch turns to the figure of the flaneur, arguing that the latter's retreat into the arcades represented an alienation from the speed of the modern world. Informed by Wolfgang Schivelbusch's history of the railway journey and Michel de Certeau's essay 'Naval et carceral' ('Railway Navigation and Incarceration'), this article examines the protagonist as railway passenger in works by Wolfgang Koeppen and Sten Nadolny, as well as by (ex-)GDR writers such as Wolfgang Hilbig, among others. ![]() Rather against expectation, this remains the case after 1945. Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, literature employed the railway network to investigate the experience of modernity. ![]() The Passenger as Flaneur? Railway Networks in German-Language Fiction since 1945 by Simon Ward
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