The Missing “Confessions of a Plagiarist”: Intermedial Borrowings in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s <i>Der Besuch der alten Dame</i> (1956)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s works have long been recognized as including borrowings and intermedial references. While Dürrenmatt revealed various sources himself throughout his lifetime, not least in the provokingly entitled “Bekenntnisse eines Plagiators” (1952), the cinema of his time remained one notable omission. A contemporaneous American western, the Oscar-nominated Bad Day at Black Rock (directed by John Sturges; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, USA, 1955), in particular, provides a fruitful line of inquiry within the context of Der Besuch der alten Dame (1956). Parallels between the play and the film include striking structural, compositional, and formal similarities, as well as shared socio-political concerns, which help uncover another source of Dürrenmatt’s masterpiece. This article reveals much about Dürrenmatt’s method of work, namely a playful use and creative reappropriation of sources, including blockbusters from American cinema.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".