Now showing 1 - 10 of 23
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    A 'key to all quotations'? A corpus-based parameter model of intertextuality
    (Oxford University Press, 2010)
    Hohl Trillini, Regula
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    Categorization and taxonomy are topical issues in intertextuality studies. Instead of increasing the number of overlapping or contradictory definitions (often established with reference to limited databases) which exist even for key concepts such as "allusion " or "quotation", we propose an electronically implemented data-driven approach based on the isolation, analysis and description of a number of relevant parameters such as general text relation, marking for quotation, modification etc. If a systematic parameter analysis precedes discussions of possible correlations and the naming of features bundles as composite categories, a dynamic approach to categorization emerges which does justice to the varied and complex phenomena in this field. The database is the HyperHamlet corpus, a chronologically and generically wide-ranging collection of Hamlet references that confront linguistic and literary researchers with a comprehensive range of formal and stylistic issues. Its multi-dimensional encodings and search facilities provide the indispensable ‘freedom from the analytic limits of hardcopy', as Jerome McGann put it. The methodological and heuristic gains include a more complete description of possible parameter settings, a clearer recognition of multiple parameter settings (as implicit in existing genre definitions), a better understanding of how parameters interact, descriptions of disregarded literary phenomena that feature unusual parameter combinations and, finally, descriptive labels for the most polysemous areas that may clarify matters without increasing taxonomical excess.
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    Scopus© Citations 11
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    HyperHamlet – Intricacies of data selection
    (Bern Open Publishing, 2009)
    HyperHamlet is a database of allusions to and quotations from Shakespeare's Hamlet, which is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation as a joint venture between the Departments of English and German Philology, and the Image & Media Lab at the University of Basel. The compilation of a corpus, whose aim is to document the "Shakespeare phenomenon", is intricate on more than one level: the desired transdisciplinary approach between linguistics, literary and cultural studies entails data selection from a vast variety of sources; the pragmatic nature of intertextual traces, i.e. their dependence on and subordination to new contexts, further adds to formal heterogeneity. This is not only a challenge for annotation, but also for data selection. As the recognition of intertextual traces is more often than not based on intuition, this paper analyses the criteria which underlie intuition so that it can be operationalised for scholarly corpus compilation. An analogue to the pragmatic model of ostensive-inferential communication with its three constitutive parts of speaker's meaning, sentence meaning and hearer's meaning has been used for analytical heuristics. Authorial intent - in a concrete as well as in an abstract historical sense - origin and specific encyclopaedic knowledge have been found to be the basic assumptions underlying data selection, while quantitative factors provide supporting evidence.
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  • Publication
    Exploring the Irrational: Ghosts in David Foster Wallace's The Pale King
    ( 2022-07-23)
    David Foster Wallace's The Pale King puts the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and its employees centerstage in a specific moment of time, namely the 1980, when neoliberalism gains ground and Ronald Reagan's tax revolution transforms the former civic tax service into a for-profit organization. Bureaucracy is typically admired for its rationality, yet irrational phenomena also play a big role in Wallace's text. Similar to Frankfurt School ideas, Wallace seems to propose not only similarities between religious zeal and adamant faith in rational systems but also that the latter cannot do without the other, because the human dimension cannot be suppressed.
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    Bureaucracy, Clerks and Spectral Realities in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King
    ( 2020-11-26)
    David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King reflects on the working conditions, thoughts and emotions of clerks at the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS). In exploring tensions and ambivalences that seem to haunt the clerks, the bureaucratic institutions, if not life itself, Wallace employs supernatural phenomena to grasp the complexity of human experience (especially when doing boring, seemingly inhuman office work). Ghosts as chimeras inhabiting a middle-ground between life and death, past and present, are particularly apt to represent concepts that transcend an ontological is/is not dichotomy. Oxymoronic qualities of (bureaucratic) reality are shown to abound in the novel, are explored and become evident on different narrative levels. The paper demonstrates how the irreal real not only infiltrates and haunts but also enriches the clerk’s world, and thus potentially also that of the reader.
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    Meaningless Work with Words: The Literary Figure of the Scribe
    ( 2019-11-22)
    The literary figure of the scribe does meaningless work with meaningful words: 'good' modern scribes are required to reproduce texts in large quantities; in order to write efficiently, they must not heed the meaning of the words. In other words, scribes decouple the signifier from the signified, and by dismissing the referent, the signifier becomes its own signified. Such a “liquidation of referentials” with all its consequences is, according to Jean Baudrillard, a characteristic phenomenon of late capitalism and its logic of equivalences. When referents are abolished and signs are integrated into a system of signs which makes meaning more “malleable,” the duplication of referent-less signs has repercussions for the power of language with regard to comprehending, communication, and social bonding. The most famous scribe in American literary history is Herman Melville’s scrivener Bartleby, who stands at the beginning of capitalist production methods in the USA. Amy Rowland’s The Transcriptionist of 2014 discusses the scribe’s plight from a contemporary perspective. While Bartleby, according to Deleuze, radicalizes referentless language and exemplifies its perverted power, Rowland’s transcriptionist sets out to retrieve lost referents. As such, the scrivener and the transcriptionist approach the dialectics of sign and referent from different ends of history, but both explore the pervasive thread of meaninglessness, despite their work with meaningful words.
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    The Examiner “Turns a page”: Form and Content in §25 of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King
    ( 2019-06-20)
    David Foster Wallace once emphasized that “fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” This conviction becomes most palpable in §25, one of the “more opaque sections” of Wallace’s The Pale King. In both form and content, the paragraph reveals a masterly condensation of the human in a dehumanized bureaucracy. While the phrase “X turns a page” is repeated about 100 times, representing the power of monotony and alienation, the reader also finds variation, rhythmic disruption and flashes of poetic insight that reveal the unassailability of human creativity and thus of human life. In addition, by experiencing formal elements that echo the narrative’s meaning, the reader is almost put into the protagonists’ position: she is obliged perplexedly to “turn pages” and work through a mass of seemingly incomprehensible linguistic data to look for the relevant information buried in there. “Sometimes what’s important is dull. Sometimes it’s work,” Wallace tells us elsewhere - his §25 not only narrates, it also demonstrates this insight.
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    "There Is No Right Life in the Wrong One": Drink and Abstinence in John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer and U.S.A.
    ( 2018-06-20)
    A contemporary critic once complained that the characters in John Dos Passos's U.S.A. "drink enough liquor to make this the most eloquent temperance tract since The Beautiful and Damned" (De Voto, 1936). However, he and other critics overlooked that not only the presence of drink is conspicuous but also its absence. 'Wet' and 'dry' heroes go both to 'hell;' yet the 'hell' of the latter is "icy" (Cowley, 1936). The 'wet' character typically lose their lives, while the 'dry' ones, despite all their success in society, lose their human souls. Consequently, if hardly anyone can find a way to live a meaningful life, something must principally be going wrong. In that John Dos Passos and Theodor W. Adorno seem unanimous: "There is no right life in the wrong one." Moreover, Dos Passos draws on the ancient Jewish-Christian tradition, where wine and strong drink have always played a significant, life-affirming role. Thus, on an abstract level, Dos Passos associates drink with the ideal of a full and meaningful life. The link to the religious tradition, in turn, connects drink with Horkheimer's understanding of objective rationality. In fact, Dos Passos appears to act out, among other things through his representation of drink, what Adorno and Horkheimer analyzed as the roles and relationships of subjective and objective reason, and the mechanisms of the culture industry in modern societies.