Options
Sixta Quassdorf
Title
Dr.
Last Name
Quassdorf
First name
Sixta
Email
sixta.quassdorf@unisg.ch
Phone
+41712242402
Now showing
1 - 10 of 16
-
PublicationType: journal articleJournal: Contemporary Women's WritingVolume: 16Issue: 1
-
PublicationA 'key to all quotations'? A corpus-based parameter model of intertextualityCategorization 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.Type: journal articleJournal: Literary and Linguistic ComputingVolume: 25Issue: 3DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqq003
Scopus© Citations 12 -
PublicationHyperHamlet – Intricacies of data selectionHyperHamlet 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.Type: journal articleJournal: Linguistik OnlineVolume: 38Issue: 2
-
PublicationExploring 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.Type: conference paper
-
PublicationBureaucracy, 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.Type: conference paper
-
PublicationType: conference paper
-
Publication"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.Type: conference paper
-
Publication“I would prefer not to take a clerkship” – The Office Novel( 2018-11-02)The sub-genre of office novel leads a niche existence (a surprising fact considering the ubiquity of offices). Nevertheless, some of the most intriguing narratives, like Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Heller’s Something Happened and Foster Wallace’s The Pale King are set in the office. Furthermore, as Mulhull (2016) has observed, in the last 20 years “the office novel has become a genre in its own right.” Kiesling (2016) concurs but notices that many of the new office novels are hidden behind labels like “‘chick lit,’ ‘girlfriend literature,’ or even ‘erotica’” because their authors are female. Two aspects of this contested genre invite attention. On the one hand, since “Bartleby,” the office narrative has marked a painful counterpoint to the Western myth: Instead of self-reliant virility, independence and an exploratory spirit, there is submission to ‘unmanly’, dull work and to the power of bureaucracy. On the other hand, the office has become an important place for women to search for independence and self-affirmation. However, this office freedom proves to be ambivalent and turns out to be just as mythical as the old promise of freedom in the West: The work regularly collides with the biological needs, social relationships and/or values of the female protagonists. Although the specific anxieties represented in office literature differ, in part according to period and perspective, these narratives nevertheless share a further common element, beyond the office setting: a critical stance towards the status quo, in combination with an exploration of choices. Choices arise when the pressure for conformity ceases to be accepted, be it out of necessity or by conscious decision. The protagonists start to take their own values, dreams and desires seriously, which leads them to acts of refusal, sabotage and other forms of non-conformity. Thus, readers are again and again reminded of “Bartleby,” who keeps providing the subtext of the genre with his famous formula “I would prefer not to.” Melville, Herman (1984 [1853]). “Bartleby, the Scrivener. A Story of Wall-Street.” Melville, Herman, 1819-1891. Pierre, or, The Ambiguities; Israel Potter; The Piazza tales; The confidence-man; Uncollected prose; Billy Budd, sailor. Ed. Harrison Hayford. New York, NY : Library of America, 667. Mulhall, Anne (2016). “Resistance and Refusal in the New Literature of the Office: Reading Lydie Salvayre's La Vie commune and Delphine de Vigan's Les Heures souterraines.” Conference Paper at Work Stories: Documenting, Narrating and Representing the French Workplace, 15 and 16 April 2016, Institute of Modern Languages Research, Senate House, University of London. http://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/6418/1/Mulhall%20-%20conference%20paper2.pdf Kiesling, Lydia (2016). “The Office Politics of Workplace Fiction by Women.” The New Yorker. July 27, 2016. www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-office-politics-of-workplace-fiction-by-women. Saval, Nikil (2014). “Bartlebys All!”Dissent (61.4): 22–26. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/bartlebys-all.Type: conference paper
-
Publication"On quoting ..." - a corpus-based study on the phraseology of well-known quotations(University of Liverpool, 2009-07-20)
-