ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a specific dimension pertaining to 'mapping the self': the 'peripatetic', which in this context designates a specific nexus of life writing, space, poetic reflection and walking. It argues that such peripatetic mappings of the biographical subject are self-consciously aesthetic and intertextual, retracing the self via paths of others and twentieth-century peripatetic texts also come to stage their subjects in the face of topographies whose biographical significance lies in their absence of cultural meaning. The etymology of the peripatetic suggests a reference to antiquity, more precisely to Aristotelian philosophy. While the peripatetic implies by way of its etymology a dimension of 'liveness', of immediacy of experience and groundedness, peripatetic subjects pursue intertextual lines and itineraries locating their vital physical presence in a topography that is invested with cultural/literary meaning. The connection of the peripatetic and 'autobiographical geopoetics' in English literature evidently goes back to Wordsworth and his fellow lake poets.
