Sixta Quassdorf
Title
Dr.
Last Name
Quassdorf
First name
Sixta
Email
sixta.quassdorf@unisg.ch
Phone
+41 71 224 2402
8 results
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Item type:Publication, Chick Lit Meets Silicon Valley: Ana Yen’s Sophia of Silicon Valley and Elisabeth Cohen’s The GlitchType:journal articleJournal:Contemporary Women's WritingVolume:16Issue:1 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, “There is no right life in the wrong one”: The Dialectic of Drink and Abstinence in John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer and USAType:journal articleJournal:Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and TheoryVolume:77Issue:3 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type: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.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, 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.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
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Item type:Publication, Meaningless 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 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
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