With Wandering Steps and Slow: Schwellenkunst in Adalbert Stifter’s Granit

This article explores what Walter Benjamin calls threshold images in Stifter’s tale, concrete objects or events that look both backwards and forwards, are allegorically infused with utopic fantasies, and nonetheless invite an awakening into history and change. The images are read for both their peculiar temporality and their allegorical poetics, and are pursued in their religious, psychological, and political dimensions before focusing on how they allegorize the work’s own aesthetic representational project through a staging of the medium-icity of language itself. The essay follows how Stifter’s language theory establishes the necessarily allegorical nature of realist representation that his aesthetic practice enacts, in ways that both ground and undermine the program of literary realism more generally.