Beyond Nostalgia: Formula and Novelty in Old English Literature
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Oral-formulaic theory has had an immense impact on the way we read and interpret Old English literature. Formulaic theory, however, can only think in terms of the repetition of “discrete,” pre-existent, and isolable units. But for Henri Bergson, the real is continuous and creative, not discrete and immobile. Following Bergson’s account of “continuous multiplicity” in Creative Evolution and drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s extension of Bergson’s thought in A Thousand Plateaus, I propose a higher order theory of Old English literary production that acknowledges its traditionalism and formulaicity, even as it attempts to conceive of the corpus in terms of novelty, originality, and experimentation. The wager is that vitalist philosophical models will allow readers to conceive of Old English literature beyond a nostalgic insistence on the return of the same.
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.
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 it