The Lowest Common Denominator: Consumerism, Branding, and Definitive Dissatisfaction in Stéphane Dompierre’s Un Petit pas pour l’homme
Bibliographic record
Abstract
inner of the 2005 Grand Prix de la releve litteraire archambault, Stephane dompierre’s debut novel Un Petit pas pour l’ homme (2004) garnered much critical acclaim; Hugues Corriveau writes in Lettres quebecoises that “Stephane dompierre a du talent a revendre. Son premier roman . . . le prouve hors de tout doute. Son ecriture est alerte, precise, pleine d’un dynamisme entrainant, convoquant avec brio le monologue, le dialogue et la description bien tournee” (20). dompierre’s fast paced, cynically comic narrative begins with the main character, daniel, having decided to leave his girlfriend of six years. disappointed by love, bored with his job in a Montreal record store, daniel contemplates his own life and keenly observes that of others in a Plateau-Mont-royal neighbourhood dominated by music, e-mail, the internet, television, and especially by a plethora of references to popular culture and consumerism. Beneath dompierre’s humorous depiction of the plight of the single male lies a sharp commentary on today’s society. although published several years before the american subprime mortgage crisis and the market crash of 2008, the novel documents the culture of decadence, consumption, and excessive credit characteristic of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and which has ultimately led to global economic meltdown. Benjamin Barber describes this culture in an interview on the CBC radio program The Current on 28 November 2008, that is, “Black Friday,” the most important shopping day of the year in the United States, a day which encapsulates today’s hyperconsumerist lifestyle:
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 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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".