Surveillance Narratives: Kafka, Orwell, and Ulrich Peltzer’s Post-9/11 Novel <i>Teil der Lösung</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks and the ensuing increase in state controlled surveillance measures questions revolving around authority, privacy and individual freedom call for re-examination. Reading Ulrich Peltzer’s contemporary Berlin novel Teil der Lösung against the backdrop of Kafka’s Der Process and Orwell’s 1984, the following paper will examine continuities and ruptures in the representation of surveillance with regards to privacy and – first and foremost – authority. Kafka’s and Orwell’s “Ur-Surveillance Novels” (Nellis 2009) are revealed as precursors to the contemporary critique of surveillance at work in Peltzer’s fiction and in Trojanow’s and Zeh’s polemic pamphlet “Angriff auf die Freiheit”. While exploring how in the wake of 9/11 political resistance towards surveilling authorities is mirrored in contemporary German literature, I also elucidate the question of narrative authority within structures of surveillance in Kafka’s Der Process, Orwell’s 1984 and Peltzer’s Teil der Lösung. I argue that Peltzer’s postmodern text criticizes surveillance practices by undoing the centralized-authoritarian position of the narrator for the sake of a more diffuse, decentralized style of narration, thereby working against anti-democratic tendencies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".