Abstract
Drawing on current debates on the effects of a new ‘culture of immediacy’ in the digital era, this articles analyses Wilhelm Genazino’s poetics of temporality. While the modern flâneur was still a sovereign subject capable of transforming fleeting impressions into moments of quasi-metaphysical vision, his contemporary successor is a stray self roaming an illegible urban jungle in search of intimacy. Genazino’s figures discover their non-contemporaneity with the contemporary as a creative resource that allows them to exercise temporal sovereignty in an era that is otherwise ruled by the hectic just-in-time ideology. Retreat into melancholy, the performance of private rituals, the fabrication of stories, the technique of the prolonged gaze and slowness emerge as five tactics of resistance through which Genazino’s protagonists achieve temporary anchorage in a run-away world. For Genazino literature necessarily rehabilitates the self’s Eigenzeit, thereby restoring interiority and intimacy as essential conditions of cultural connectivity.
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