Topics in 20th-Century Literature : Robert Walser: Experiments in Prose

Robert Walser – one of the last literary modernists to have been rediscovered in recent decades – still forces us to reassess our conceptions of ‘the literary’, the limits of the œuvre, of ‘literary genius’ and ‘madness,’ and of what the ‘materiality’ of the text encompasses. Defeating existing methods and calling for new ones, Walser’s radical experiments in prose challenge us to both study and scrutinize narratological paradigms (such as point of view and free indirect discourse), self-reflexivity, tone, rhetoric and anti-rhetoric. Taught in German.