Reading Robert Walser

Reading Robert Walser concentrates on the letters sent by the author Robert Walser to Frieda Mermet, the laundry manager at a Swiss psychiatric hospital where his sister worked as a teacher. Their exchange continued from 1913 to 1942, covering the time when Walser’s literary fortunes declined, after which he himself was placed in an asylum for almost three decades before his death in 1956.

This epistolary history provides a reflection on the question of correspondence and literature, particularly the subject of lost correspondence, gender, the question of address and the performance of identity. Simon Wortham frames the letters with an extensive critical biography about the life and writing of Robert Walser, whose work has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. As her side of the exchange no longer survives, the book concludes with a fictional reimagining of Mermet’s response to Walser’s letters. This creative part is carefully introduced by chapters on epistolary writing in a range of critical settings from modernism to literary theory and deconstruction, as well as exploring what is at stake in creative engagements with a literary legacy of this kind.

Praise for Reading Robert Walser

‘The very question of a subject is at stake in this enchanting book. Intriguingly, each chapter has a different voice: from a man writing about Walser to a man writing as a woman speaking as Walser, with a chorus in between that produces an exhilarating threefold reading of strangely connected desires.’
Sharon Kivland, artist, writer, and editor of the independent press MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE

‘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