"It Was My Dream That Screwed Up": The Relativity of Transcendence in On the Road
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper interrogates Jack Kerouac's appropriation and transformation of a Thoreauvian-style transcendentalism by reading On the Road through Mikhail Bakhtin's discussion of the chronotope. Kerouac's chronotopic resistance to dominant visions of the United States brings with it a problematic identity politics, specifically in terms of the racialization of the representation of transcendent identity. Rather than a personal or specific failure of a particular author or text, this tension can be read as a portrayal of the inevitable failure of social critiques that are based on notions of finding an "authentic" identity in a transcendence beyond, and disconnected from, historical and personal contexts. In other words, On the Road can be seen as a portrayal of the problems of an American romantic notion of identity, which makes universal claims about the transcendental potential of the individual. On the Road thus points to a difficulty surrounding dominant US notions of the self-reliance of the individual per se. À la lecture de On the Road par le truchement de la discussion de Mikhail Bakhtin sur le chronotope, le présent article s'interroge sur l'appropriation et la transformation par Jack Kerouac d'un transcendantalisme dans le style de Thoreau. La résistance chronotopique de Kerouac aux visions dominantes desÉtats-Unis comporte une politique identitaire problématique, plus particulièrement en termes de racialisation de la représentation d'une identité transcendante. Plutô t qu'un échec personnel ou particulier d'un auteur ou d'un texte, on peut évaluer cette tension comme un portrait de l'échec inévitable des critiques sociales basées sur la notion qu'il faut trouver une identité « authentique » dans une transcendance déconnectée qui va au-delà des contextes historiques et personnels. En d'autres mots, on peut considérer On the Road comme la représentation des problèmes d'une notion romantique américaine de l'identité qui élargit le potentiel de transcendance de l'individu à l'échelle universelle. On the Road souligne ainsi la difficulté entourant les notions américaines dominantes de l'autonomie de la personne même.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.076 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".