Don DeLillo’s Anagogic Postcards: Thematic Inscriptions Writ Small
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article critically explores Don DeLillo’s strategic use of postcards to highlight and reinforce the central thematic preoccupations in his fiction. As early-twentieth-century communication technologies, postcards precariously navigated the uneasy boundaries between public and private concerns, establishing cultural protocols about the proper use of these modern epistolary forms. Commonly associated as they are with tourism and American kitsch culture, postcards have become productive sites for exploring contemporary anxieties about interpersonal relationships and subjectivity. They are mass-produced objects containing standardized formats that are then inscribed with individualized (and therefore highly subjective) messages. Although the postcard has been superseded as a communication technology by a number of more cost- and time-efficient modes of communication (e-mailing, texting, tweeting, and using other social media devices), postcard use has not been abandoned (think cheap postal advertising and anthrax scares), and DeLillo’s fiction—from Great Jones Street and Amazons to White Noise, Libra, The Day Room, and The Names—confirms the postcard’s literary longevity.
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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 | 0.007 |
| 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 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".