Of Lounging and Longing: Modernist Impatience and Hotel Time in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice

Hotel spaces are constantly between movement and stasis, progress and tradition, exclusion and inclusion, and residence and homelessness; this betweenness is punctuated by the hotel's temporary inhabitants experiencing feelings of anticipation, waiting, and sometimes even "paralysis and hope-lessness" (Short 2019). In many cases, literary representations of waiting in hotel rooms or lobbies became spaces for waiting out a social or personal crisis, thus infusing the space with feelings of impatience for an uncertain future. The familiarity of the hotel became a steady landmark that authors employed to provide their characters with temporary relief from everyday per-sonal and social traumatization, marking the hotel as not only a non-place (Aug & eacute; 1995) but a different temporality altogether. This article explores this temporality-in particular, impatience and modernist time-in Thomas Ma n n's Death in Venice (1912). Ultimately, the case is made for impatience as an operative affect of modernist time.