‘Illegible’: From scribbles to cryptography

We take it for granted that we can read texts. Yet the opposite phenomenon – illegibility – is more multifaceted than one might initially suppose. From ancient or cryptic manuscripts, through foreign writing systems and encrypted messages, to creative forms of textual and semantic distortion, we repeatedly come up against the limits of legibility. To prepare for a visit to the ‘Unreadable’ exhibition at the Strauhof Literature Museum, this lecture offers a thematic overview using examples from the collections of the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern.