Bibliographic record
Abstract
What does teenage fiction suggest to us about being a body in time and space?Six popular young adult novels are used to approach this question in this paper.If in the act of reading, the language and text leak into our lives and become an organic part of our relationships, then what happens to us when we read different kinds of books, and what do we learn from our readings about living in the world?In some young adult novels, we come face to face with characters who are absolutely individualistic and self-centred.What is it about these books that makes us want to read them?Do these books sever our bodies and living from relationships which might be possible?And then there are other books which remind us of the ways our identity is caught up in and tangled through how we live in our bodies in the world.Does it make a difference what books adolescent readers in our classrooms have access to?Recently in a Large Chain Super Bookstore, while browsing with my sister, sipping too-sweet grandemochalattafrappynappycinnos, we stopped before the shelves containing literally hundreds of series books written and published for the teenage (mostly female) readership.While I knew many of these books only through child readers in my classroom, my sister, ten years younger than I, remembered reading many of them with great fondness.She walked down the shelves and pointed to the books, recalling in significant detail certain characters and story lines.Why did you read so many of them?I asked her.Why did you like them so much?Her response: The books (in her case mostly Sweet Valley High and Babysitter's Club) gave her an imaginary world where she could be everything she wasn't: Thin.Beautiful.Popular.She explained how the characters in the stories, while usually not extremely rich, were well enough off to afford the kinds of clothes and activities she could not.They had boyfriends and great families.They were relatively intelligent and successful in school if not the top students.Everyone liked them.They were all-round perfect girls.They lacked nothing.Their lives were easy and fun.That was her fantasy world.That was where she could live when immersed in the books.While she read, my sister could pretend to be those girls in all their popular thin pretty pink perfection confectionism.Yum.When I decided to take up the topic of this paper, I had something specific in mind, a line of discussion I planned to follow.I knew I wanted to address the ways (female?) bodies are represented in teenage fiction, and I knew I wanted to say something about the ways we "read" our bodies as we read fictional literature.I had the idea that certain books portray "bad" images and stories of bodies and experiences of relationships with our bodies, and I wanted to suggest that there might be some books which offer alternative representations and readings of our bodies, "good" books that is.I chose a few to fit in this category, with no specific criteria in mind other than I thought they might represent the human body, its experiences and relationships with the world, in interesting ways, in ways to make us stop and think about what it is to be/have a body living in this world:Out of the Dust, by Karen Hesse (1997) Owl in Love, by Patrice Kindl (1993)
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".