"'Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?'": Functions of the "Unspeakable" in American Gothic Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My project is an investigation of the uses and functions of the “unspeakable” in American Gothic literature. The unspeakable, or inexpressible, may occur both stylistically and thematically, take different forms and effects, and implicate different anxieties or cultural concerns. Inexpressibility occurs when the text draws attention to an uncanny absence of explication or signification, or signification that is beyond access—when the text gestures towards that which cannot be stated, described, defined, articulated, or located. For this project, I carefully and repeatedly read Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. My final project, focusing on Poe’s short stories and Morrison’s Beloved, aims to explore the different functions of the unspeakable--examining its rhetorical and thematic applications, as well as its implications for American history and identity. I examine how the unspeakable engages with concepts of identity, race, and socio-political reality; I trace it from its early appearances in Poe’s stories, where it registers a specific anxiety, to its re-appropriation in Morrison’s novel as an exploration not only of the limits of language, but of the specific limitations of the imperialistic English discourse. My thesis explores the significance and resonance of the things that cannot be spoken in certain American Gothic texts, and investigates the implications of inexpressibility for the American narrative.
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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.058 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".