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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 - 8 of 8
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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
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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
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PublicationType: conference paper
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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"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
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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
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Publication"On quoting ..." - a corpus-based study on the phraseology of well-known quotations(University of Liverpool, 2009-07-20)