| Summary: | <p>This thesis brings five German modernist texts into dialogue with contemporary cognitive studies. In doing so, it opens up a space from which to explore an often-neglected aspect of German modernist texts, namely their exploration of how one can re-situate oneself in unfamiliar environments. Rather than emphasising the alienation and isolation that these texts explore regarding the modern urban environment, this dialogue helps us focus on the more dynamic moments of use, responsiveness, cooperation, and coordination also at the heart of these explorations. At the same time, the modernist period, as a dynamic and often overwhelming time of socio-political and material change and upheaval, also asks us to shift our focus, in contemporary cognitive studies, away from smooth coping, that is, the moments in which things go well and easy. Infusing cognitive studies with the existential questions asked by these texts helps us explore not only the ways in which we react to the socio-material environment’s resistance and frustration of our everyday comportments, but also the ways in which we can come to be responsive to, and re-situate ourselves in, such unfamiliar territory. Through this dialogue, then, I develop an answer to the problem of the recalcitrance of an unfamiliar environment, a problem which is increasingly relevant in a global, uproot-ed, and dynamic world. It submits a task-oriented approach to unfamiliarity, one that is affectively responsive to the affordances of the environment, especially those of other people, a responsiveness that can be achieved, somewhat counter-intuitively, through the re-animating warmth of the familiar other.</p>
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