Suburbia’s Alien Reek: Contract and Relation in John Cheever’s <i>Bullet Park</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Since its establishment in the waning years of World War II, the US post-war suburb has connoted inauthenticity and conformity. But the understanding of authenticity implicit in this characterization presupposes an individualist notion of selfhood and a contractualist approach to social relations—presuppositions that, in turn, lead us to anticipate the very conformity also associated with inauthenticity. This article argues that the fiction of John Cheever adheres, not to the Romantic individualism that underlies normative views of suburbia, but to the process of identity formation described by Martin Heidegger, one that emphasizes relation to the present and factual. Accordingly, it claims that Cheever’s 1969 novel Bullet Park imagines suburbia as a prime space, not for inauthenticity and conformity, but for difference and intersubjectivity.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".