Notice bibliographique
Résumé
It’s Not About Whales: Moby-Dick and Disinformation Ross Bullen (bio) Sonya larson’s 2017 short story “The Kindest” is not about whales. It is about a kidney donation, although whether it’s about a specific person’s real life kidney donation is a matter of debate and disinformation. In a 5 October 2021 story for the New York Times Magazine titled “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?,” Robert Kolker detailed the ongoing feud between Larson and another writer, Dawn Dorland, who claimed that Larson lifted details from her life and plagiarized portions of a letter, published on a private Facebook group, about Dorland’s experience as an anonymous kidney donor. In “The Kindest,” a Dorland-like character named Rose Rothario (originally Dawn Rothario) sends a letter to the story’s narrator, a Chinese American woman named Chuntao, who was the anonymous recipient of one of her kidneys. Larson, who is Asian American, depicts Rose Rothario as a cringe white saviour figure, who wants to meet Chuntao in order to extract emotional labour from her in the form of gratitude. Exactly how much of Larson’s story is lifted from Dorland’s experience as an altruistic kidney donor, including the letter she posted on Facebook, has become a matter of both legal and popular debate (indeed, literary Twitter debated little else in the days after Kolker’s story went online). For her part, Larson has tried to distance herself from Dorland’s story and claims that “The Kindest” isn’t really about a kidney donation at all. [End Page 7] Rather, in Larson’s view, the story is primarily about the racially charged power dynamic between Rose Rothario and Chuntao. In “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?,” Kolker writes, “When Larson discusses ‘The Kindest’ now, the idea that it’s about a kidney donation at all seems almost irrelevant. If that hadn’t formed the story’s pretext, she believes, it would have been something else. ‘It’s like saying that “Moby-Dick” is a book about whales,’ she said.” I think most readers know what Larson means: while on a literal level Moby-Dick is about a whaling voyage, on a literary level it’s about a host of Big Literary Themes like good versus evil, humanity versus nature, Ahab’s monomania versus Starbuck’s level-headed pragmatism, and so on. Along the same lines, Larson implies that “The Kindest” could have featured similar characters and themes while using a completely different “pretext” for bringing the characters together. Focusing on the kidney donation is “irrelevant” because, Larson suggests, that’s not what the story is actually about. What interests me about Larson’s comparison of her story with Moby-Dick is how it affirms that Melville’s novel has become, in the popular imagination, the example par excellence of a literary text whose ostensible subject matter must be set aside in order to discern what it is “really about.” Larson is hardly alone in her disavowal of whales in Moby-Dick. Allow me to cite another recent example from the Netflix show glow. In the penultimate episode of season 3, “The Libertines,” Ruth—an aspiring actress and the main heel of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling show—auditions for a Hollywood movie. The character she is reading for is a straight-shooting high school English teacher who delivers an impassioned speech to a student, Julie, who says that her problem isn’t that she doesn’t care about her grade. It’s just that she doesn’t care about whales: “Moby-Dick is not about whales, Julie. It’s about passion. Obsession. Finding the one thing that cuts through all the crap, that keeps on driving you, no matter what. And if you can find the thing you care about as much as Herman Melville cares about whale semen, then maybe you won’t totally fuck up your life.” Despite the writers of glow confusing spermaceti, the waxy liquid extracted from the heads of sperm whales, with whale semen, Ruth’s monologue does highlight the fact that, setting aside whatever else he might have been interested in, Herman Melville was really, really into whales. When he was...
Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.
Comment cette classification a été obtenuedéplier
Prédiction machine sur la base complète
Imitation des enseignantsNi prévalence calibrée, ni vérité terrain. Validation humaine à venir. Le volet Gemma est une étiquette directe du modèle pour chaque travail de la base, lue sur la notice réduite au titre. Le volet Codex est un classifieur appris des 10 348 étiquettes directes de Codex et calibré sur les taux pondérés de l'échantillon; les champs sans appui suffisant ne portent aucun appel Codex. Le mode candidate est l'union des deux volets; le consensus est leur intersection. Ces sorties portent le statut machine_predicted_unvalidated et ne sont pas des étiquettes humaines.
Scores du classifieur distillé par catégorie (deux têtes)
| Catégorie | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Métarecherche | 0,003 | 0,010 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens strict) | 0,001 | 0,000 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens large) | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Bibliométrie | 0,001 | 0,001 |
| Études des sciences et des technologies | 0,022 | 0,016 |
| Communication savante | 0,010 | 0,011 |
| Science ouverte | 0,001 | 0,007 |
| Intégrité de la recherche | 0,005 | 0,009 |
| Charge utile insuffisante (le modèle a refusé de juger) | 0,011 | 0,003 |
Scores machine (provisoires)
Les deux têtes enseignantes du modèle étudiant, lues sur ce travail. Un score ordonne la base pour la relecture; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie, et le statut de validation accompagne chaque rangée tel quel.
Scores de référence d'un modèle non mature (critères de maturité non atteints, 7 itérations). Un score ordonne; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · tel quel depuis la passe de notation : score_only signifie que le nombre peut ordonner les travaux, et qu'aucune étiquette de catégorie n'en découleClassification
machine, non validéePrédiction automatique; un appel candidat d’une seule source (Gemma direct ou Codex distillé), pas un consensus.
Le détail, modèle par modèle et score par score, se trouve en fin de page sous « Comment cette classification a été obtenue ».