Between “Location” and “Things”: Barbara Guest, American Pragmatism, and the Construction of Subjectivity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article focuses mainly on poems from Guest’s first collection, The Location of Things. Many of these depict poetic personae in a state of flux, moving ceaselessly between domestic, urban, coastal, and rural environments, exchanging one idea, mood, or vocabulary for an always beckoning other. This emphasis on transition, with its implications for the construction and reconstruction of identity, is, in my view, part of a pragmatist inheritance, yet Guest distanced herself from such an association in an interview with Charles Bernstein in 1995. There are a number of potential reasons for such distancing, but her full-throated disavowal raises the question: what does Guest herself understand pragmatism to be? In taking up this question, the article will look to William James for an account of pragmatism that might have persuaded the poet to modify her stance.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| 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".