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In 1981 Peter Handke published the semi-autobiographical text Kindergeschichte, containing reflections on the early years of life with his daughter Amina. During these years, Amina frequently wrote and drew in her father’s notebooks. This article considers Amina not only as the subject of her father’s work but also as a kind of co-author, by grounding the narrative thematization of the interaction between child and adult in the concrete interaction of their writing and drawing practices in Handke’s notebooks. The observation of his child’s entry into the material-semiotic systems of writing, I suggest, heightened Handke’s awareness of the visuality and materiality of his own compositional practice. Much like the “lessons” he learned from the painter Paul Cézanne in composing Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire, Amina’s emergent drawing and writing practice, her concrete “Suche nach Formen” on the pages of her father’s notebooks, was intertwined in the ongoing evolution of her father’s project of writing as it took shape in Kindergeschichte.

This article examines the persistence of the notion of the immaterial text in literary studies, now decades into the so-called material turn. Digitization of manuscripts increasingly confronts us with the facts of textual materiality and material authorship, yet many scholars remain ill-equipped to engage these traces in order to expand the possibilities of textual interpretation. The journeys of Peter Handke’s notebooks serve as a case study on how to interrogate various definitions of text and methodological approaches that reinforce an understanding of texts as immaterial. This article thus elucidates the conceptual and methodological impediments to more comprehensively integrating materiality into interpretation; an uneasiness, for example, about approaching authorship—the process and agency of textual production—lingers despite resurrections since the Author’s “death” and more recent transdisciplinary retheorizations of agency. The article finally looks to reflections on materiality in another field, art history, to clarify the reasons that integrating materiality into interpretative criticism remains so difficult, so that the field might begin to move beyond these obstacles.

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