Strollology as a Reading Protocol

Hunger, Thresholds, and Episodic Perception in Hemingway’s Paris

Abstract

This article proposes a strollological reading of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, focusing on the chapter ‘Hunger Was Good Discipline’. Drawing on Lucius Burckhardt’s Spaziergangswissenschaft (strollology), I turn the ‘science of strolling’ into a compact reading protocol for narrative walking. The analysis foregrounds three interconnected dimensions: (i) episodic perception, where the walk unfolds as a sequence of perceptual scenes; (ii) thresholds, understood as crossings and micro-decisions that reorganise narrative space; and (iii) bodily cues, with hunger functioning as a perturbation that diverts movement and re-ranks urban affordances. In Hemingway’s Paris, hunger is not a mere background condition but an active filter of attention: it sharpens vision, intensifies sensory avoidance, and redistributes desire across streets, shop windows, and places of respite. By emphasising the interplay between embodied cues and spatial choice, the paper clarifies what strollology can contribute to literary geography: a method for reading how texts produce urban space from within the moving body, through expectation, interruption, and the logic of the route.