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Sixta Quassdorf
Title
Dr.
Last Name
Quassdorf
First name
Sixta
Email
sixta.quassdorf@unisg.ch
Phone
+41712242402
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1 - 7 of 7
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PublicationType: journal articleJournal: Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and TheoryVolume: 77Issue: 3
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PublicationMeaningless 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.Type: conference paper
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PublicationThe 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.Type: conference paper
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Publication"A little more than kin" - Quotations as a linguistic phenomenon : a study based on quotations from Shakespeare's HamletQuotations "oscillate between the occasional and the conventional" as Burger/Buhofer/Sialm (1982) once succinctly formulated. Developed from a PhD thesis, this book explores precisely this "oscillating" character of quotations: It discusses the nature of quotations and the relationship between common quotations and phraseology from a theoretical and an empirical perspective. Shakespeare's Hamlet was chosen as a canonical text whose frequently quoted traces can be followed across centuries. Scholarly work from various disciplines leads to an understanding of quotations as moving in a space created by the two dimensions of reference and repetition: Quotations are definable by a horizontal communicative axis (reference) and a vertical, intertextual axis of manifest lineages of use (repetition). Empirically, the data led to a categorisation of quotations as verbal, thematic and onomastic, based on the question "what has been repeated: words, themes or names?" Case studies further corroborate the proposition that verbal quotations may become (almost) ordinary multi-word units if the following conditions are met: a) they lose their referential dimension, b) they develop formal and/or semantic usage patterns and/or c) they are no longer limited to their original, literary discourse.Type: book
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PublicationMeaningless Work with Words: The Plight of the Literary ScribeThis paper argues that literary scribes constitute a fertile ground for understanding (post)modern transformations concerning the relationship between sign and referent. Scribes are not supposed to be concerned with the signified, but merely with the transposition of the signifier as signifier from one medium to the other - a mechanical work that, by decoupling the signifier from its signified, turns meaningful words into meaningless objects for the sake of profit generation. Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) and Amy Rowland’s The Transcriptionist (2014) are two narratives about scribes that implicitly discuss the mechanisms of decoupling the linguistic sign from its referent and speculate about the repercussions. The scrivener and the transcriptionist, the one at the beginning and the other at the erstwhile end of industrial capitalism, thus enter into the discourse about an economic system that shows its ultimately inhuman foundations in its treatment of its human collaborators, who first have to adapt to machine-logic and then, when machine-logic is all-pervasive, are being replaced by machines altogether. Moreover, the scribes seem to warn us that the “liquidation of all referentials” (Baudrillard) threatens to deprive human beings of meaningful, intersubjective language. Yet, as human beings are each the zoon logon echon, an animal that has language, this threat to language could amount to an existential threat to humanity itself.Type: book section
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Publication"I would prefer not to": Routine and Agency in Office Fiction(Narr Francke Attempto Verlag, 2019-11)