« Excessive Storytelling »: Seetzen as a Protagonist in the Postmodern Adventure Novel Empty Quarter – Rub ’al-Khali (1996) by Michael Roes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his novel Empty Quarter – Rub ’al-Khali, published in 1996, Berlin writer Michael Roes tells of a fictional traveller to the Orient, Ferdinand Alois Schnittke, who is searching for Moses’s Tablets of the Law in the late eighteenth century. The reflections of the nameless, first-person narrator living in Yemen serve as a contrafaction to Schnittke’s narrative. The postmodern anthropologist has discovered Schnittke’s travel records and also starts a journey in search of the Western ‘self’, anthropological dimensions of games and gaming, and the roots of Orientalism in modern times. Echoing the style of Umberto Eco, Roes has written a brilliantly told postmodern adventure novel, which was also submitted as a Habilitation thesis in the subject of Ethnology at the Free University of Berlin. Moreover, in the appendix, Roes not only listed the various games that he observed and described in Yemen, but also he meticulously breaks down the sources used in the historical narrative section, including Ulrich Jasper Seetzen’s Travels through Syria (posth. 1854–1859). My essay addresses the question of how (1.) Roes’s protagonist can be identified with Seetzen and (2.) how orientalism, anthropology, and postmodern self-reflection are related in the novel.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".