Between 1924 and 1933, Robert Walser—fearing he was going insane and suffering from writer’s block of a conventional scale—developed a radical new method of writing. He would take discarded materials (calendars, receipt slips, the backs of business cards, newspaper clippings) and cover them in a minuscule, slanted, idiosyncratic script.
: Seeing the high-resolution scans of the original scraps is essential to understanding the physical labor of Walser's work. robert walser microscripts pdf
For years, scholars debated their nature. Was it "asylum art"? Was it automatic writing? Was it the meaningless output of a schizophrenic mind? It would take a revolution in philological analysis to prove that these were not mere scribbles, but a hidden library. Between 1924 and 1933, Robert Walser—fearing he was
When Walser intended to publish a piece, he manually transcribed it back into normal ink script for publishers. Literary Value Found in the Microscripts For years, scholars debated their nature