Writing (Fat) Bodies: Grotesque Realism and the Carnivalesque in Percival Everett’s <i>Zulus</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Percival Everett’s novel Zulus (1989) is a dark and deeply engrossing post-apocalyptic meditation on the ravages of war and its tyrannical effect on human communication, connections, and understanding. It is also a satire and a foray, both comic and deadly serious, into the grotesque realism of the tradition of Rabelais and Swift. The article examines aspects of grotesque realism and the carnivalesque through a Bakhtinian lens and explores Zulus in light of current theory concerning fat, embodiment, and what Mark Graham coins as lipoliteracy; that is, the way we “read” fat as conveying intelligible messages about bodies and food. Thus, the article embraces, yet moves beyond, standard readings of the grotesque body by exploring the materiality of the fat body as it is affected and as it affects societal standards of the corporeal.
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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 | 0.004 | 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 | 0.007 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".