L’Afrique à rebours: la décadence dans un corpus de littérature Togolaise
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the past fifteen years, the West African country of Togo has witnessed the emergence of a new generation of writers - a third generation since independence from colonisation - working in the French language. Born around 1960, these writers have been making their way onto the literary scene since approximately 1990. A certain number of distinctive traits, which have attracted the attention of critics, unequivocally delineate this generation from the two that preceded it. Among these is a new literary aesthetic that resonates with the fin de siècle - with the end of the twentieth century, but also with the end of the second millennium. Moreover, such ends of time cycles, because they exacerbate apprehension about the future and provoke a desire to re-evaluate the past, are propitious to the development of Decadent literatures.The goal of this contribution is to examine parallels between the nineteenth century Decadence movement and the new literary aesthetic being employed by Togolese writers of the third generation - and to thereby demonstrate that their aesthetic is without question a neo-Decadent one. Not only does it emerge at the end of the century/millennium, a time when humanity is inevitably reflecting on its fate, but it also coincides with the accelerating globalisation of information (the Internet) and of commercial markets, a context worth taking into account in that it represents a symbolic loss of landmarks, and a doing away with traditional frontiers - both themes that have preoccupied Decadents of all times and all places. Using the work of two Togolese writers (Kossi Efoui and Sami Tchak), this article will explore in exactly what ways these writers can be categorized as Decadents, and the different methods of transgression they use to depict their discontent with their society of origin, which, at the end of the twentieth century, is in a situation of political, economic and social decay.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".