Walking toward Genre: The Pedestrian Excursus

Abstract

W.G. Sebald suggests that "there can be something like a physiology of literature, that is, that our embodiment and the way we move our body can be transferred to literature." His The Rings of Saturn belongs among a burgeoning category of texts, including Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines and Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain, that aspire to this transference by explicitly peripatetic means, where themes are embodied along paths and cognition itself is understood to be participatory and distributed over the mobile body. Though characterized as unclassifiable hybrids of established genres, such peripatetic texts are novel elaborations of the excursus, a digression amplifying, glossing, footnoting or deviating from a discourse. This composite subgenre has a meandering, circumstantial and heuristic organization predicated on homologies between walking, thinking and composition. The footpath becomes the site of an environmentally interdependent alternative to Cartesian models of understanding, one that conditions literary form.