Description: A radical engagement with Robert Walser's correspondence that turns literary criticism into an act of creative recovery.
Robert Walser's letters to Frieda Mermet, the laundry manager at a Swiss psychiatric hospital, offer an intimate and enigmatic glimpse into the mind of a writer whose literary fortunes waned even as his influence grew in the decades following his death. Covering nearly thirty years, from 1913 to 1942, these letters chart Walser's transition from a celebrated modernist to a man institutionalized, yet still deeply engaged with language and identity. In Reading Robert Walser, Simon Wortham studies Walser's letters within the broader context of modernist literature and deconstruction, and also imaginatively reconstructs Mermet's possible lost responses, blurring the lines between criticism and creativity. The result is an innovative exploration of authorship and the act of reading itself--one that deepens our understanding of Walser's life and work while questioning the very nature of literary correspondence.Brief description: Simon Wortham is professor of critical humanities at Kingston University.
Review Quotes: "Reading Robert Walser gifts us a psychologically flexible approach to the incomparably brilliant modernist writer. Never pathologizing, Wortham shows that Walser's texts challenge us to think "asexuality" and "queerness" in new and dynamic ways. Rather than pathologizing Walser, Wortham productively stays under Walser's spell."-- "Barbara N. Nagel, Princeton University"