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Sixta Quassdorf
Title
Dr.
Last Name
Quassdorf
First name
Sixta
Email
sixta.quassdorf@unisg.ch
Phone
+41712242402
Now showing
1 - 8 of 8
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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)
;Heim, Cécile ;Vejdovsky, BorisPickford, BenjaminType: book sectionVolume: 38 -
PublicationType: book section
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PublicationType: book sectionJournal: Phraseologie und ParömiologieVolume: 29
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PublicationQuotations and their co(n)texts : Corpus-based insights into discoursing with HamletThe HyperHamlet database which is being developed at the English Department of the University of Basel confirms the intuition that literary quotations come in many shapes, and that readers may perceive them even if they do not know the source text. The paper focuses on the ways of signalling the presence of an extraneous string of words, and in particular discusses variants of clues offered by the embedding co(n)text. This includes obvious markers such as quotation tags or typographical elements, but also more implicit phenomena such as marking by genre, marking by deviance, or multiple marking. One conclusion is the necessity of contextualizing the importance of quotation marks, which are often discussed as the defining criterion of quotations, predetermining the data sets selected for investigation. This wide-spread approach, however, limits insight, since other unambiguous markers may co-occur with or even substitute quotation marks.