Water, Clouds, Rocks: Nonhuman Temporalities and Adalbert Stifter’s Poetics of Nature

This contribution reads Stifter’s work and its critical reception alongside the tradition of American transcendentalism. In both cases, the narrative immersion into a nonhuman, supposedly harmonious and ahistoric environment has often been interpreted as a metaphor for inherently cultural or political issues. From this point of view, Stifter’s particular prose style either conceals a tendency towards political conservatism or hints at poetological problems of literary realism. Conversely, I argue that Stifter’s writing questions clear oppositions between cultural and natural phenomena. Moreover, the detailed depictions of landscapes and inorganic phenomena in The High Forest (Der Hochwald, 1841), Cat-Silver (Katzensilber, 1853), Rock Crystal (Bergkristall, 1853), and Indian Summer (Der Nachsommer, 1856) increasingly adopt a nonanthropocentric perspective that presents metereological, geological, and climatic processes as active and autonomous forces. All four texts translate this activity into a distinctive prose that differs from the tradition of nature writing and its often documentary style. While Stifter’s digressive descriptions and lengthy enumerations are at odds with notions of linear narration, they widen the perspective to include nonhuman materialities and time scales of geological and meteorological processes.