Grieving Time: The Recollection and Reproduction of Loss in Madeleine Thien’s Certainty
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Madeleine Thien’s Certainty proposes a restructuring of how individuals and societies conceptualize trauma and loss in time. While post-Freudian attempts to depathologize melancholia have traditionally relegated melancholic losses to the past – a move that ultimately limits the agency of the subjects of grief – loss continuously occupies the present of Thien’s text, even when the event(s) in question occurred in the past. As the traumatic images and events of the past perpetually repeat in the present of this novel, characters experience loss not simply as a spectre of the past but as an imminence that is always about to arrive. This configuration of loss as imminent produces the potential for transformation, or for an active and agential engagement with loss; it gives characters the opportunity to engage productively with loss in both the present and in the future. Through this disruption of the teleology of loss, Thien clears a temporal space where the melancholic subject or community can move from “grief” to “grievance.”
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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".