‘The explosive devices of memory’: trauma and the construction of identity in narrative
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article attempts to show how a cognitive approach to textual analysis can function alongside other critical methodologies. Helen Weinzweig's novel Basic Black with Pearlsis an examination of the effects of trauma on the psyche, and in particular on its construction and maintenance of a sense of identity. As Shirley, the novel's narrator, struggles to locate the various aspects of her own identity, so too is the reader forced to experience this struggle in the act of attempting to construct for Shirley an identity out of her fragmented and discontinuous narrative. I approach this interpretational problem from two perspectives. Making use primarily of the work by Caruth, I demonstrate how Weinzweig's text might be read according to a canonical trauma paradigm. On the other hand, I consider Weinzweig's text within a cognitive stylistic framework, making use of Turner and Fauconnier's theory of conceptual blending and its various incarnations, as well as Lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory. With these methodologies, the article proposes an account of the specific stylistic differences between the narrative representation of identity and that of identity in trauma.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".