“The Funny Side of Nature: Whitman, Ginsberg and America’s ‘Dark Poet’”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many American writers of the Romantic tradition have seen a unity between humanity, spirituality and nature, and strived to articulate it in language. The notion of Romantic interconnectedness expressed in the work of Transcendentalists such as Emerson and Whitman, for instance, also features in the mid-twentieth century writing of the Beats, most notably Allen Ginsberg. More recently, however, postmodernism/postructuralism has worked to undermine that project. Given the split between signifier and signified, the idea that language can have any kind of unifying function, or put us in touch with transcendent values, seems untenable, even laughable. This paper argues that the American stand-up comedian, Bill Hicks, reveals a passionate awareness of the link between humanity, spirituality and nature, and that he seeks to express it in routines which have strong affinities with American Romanticism. It constructs Hicks as a comedian who exhibits many of the characteristics of a postmodernist, but whose humor manages to transcend relativity in order to reclaim and embody the spirit of Romantic unity.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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 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".