Working Towards A Better Nation: Innovation and Entrapment in the fiction of Alasdair Gray
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the seeming contradiction between the disavowal of moralizing in literature which Gray makes in his comments on Agnes Owens, and the extent to which Gray's critics have asserted a political message as a key constituent in his own work. In exploring this issue, focus falls in a large part on the less than positive appraisal of the 'radicalism' of Gray's politics offered by Alison Lumsden. Following on from several of Gray's commentators, the principle vehicle for Gray's political commentary within fiction is taken to be his explicit representation, in both realist and allegorical modes, of the political realities in which he writes. This grounding for his project is then shown to be incompatible with the politically radical message which Lumsden seems to imply as a necessary yet absent factor in Gray's work, while allowing some form of political intervention to be made without contradicting the rules Gray himself has suggested for political fiction. Important to this is the notion of an as-yet unrealised freedom beyond - both thematically and temporally - Gray's immediate focus, and of the individual actions within and against each entrapping political system which Gray's fiction recurrently represents and valorises.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".