MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W2286225852 · doi:10.14288/1.0102181

Elements of the gothic in Melville and Conrad

2011· article· en· W2286225852 on OpenAlex
Penelope Lee Connell

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenuecIRcle (University of British Columbia) · 2011
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicJoseph Conrad and Literature
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsHistoryArtPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This thesis has two purposes. The first is to trace the gradual transformation of certain Gothic traits, primarily those of the veil and the Doppelganger, from their original form in the historical Gothic to the manner of their use by Joseph Conrad. The second is to interpret Moby-Dick. Lord Jim. The Secret Sharer, and Benito Cereno in terms of Gothicism, and by this interpretation both to strengthen some common interpretations and to indicate how certain others have resulted from the authors' careful and successful attempts to hide from their critics the moral beliefs and dilemmas in their works. When Coleridge wrote the Rime, he was introducing a new and very important setting into Gothic literature: the sea. Because of the formlessness of the sea, because of the suddenness of its change in appearance from serenity to malicious killer, and because its glassy surface hides unimaginable unknowns, it is obviously well-suited to Melville's purposes in Moby-Dick. He makes use of his readers' acquaintance with Gothic tales in portraying Ahab and Ishmael, who struggle for self-knowledge by facing the sea and its terrors. In Lord Jim, Conrad uses the same initial situation: the unseen agent of destruction which takes all security from Jim's life, and prompts in him a quest like that of the Ancient Mariner or the Wandering Jew. He exists behind a veil which represents, as it does in Moby-Dick, Benito Cereno, and most Gothic novels, the inability to clarify moral issues and act according to personal moral beliefs. This moral ambiguity is often phrased in other terms, namely the duality of being, the "good"-"bad" dichotomy, where two aspects of the same person are often separated by a veil of some sort; this can be seen in such stories as Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Wilde's Dorian Gray, and Poe's William Wilson. It is also the case with The Secret Sharer. In this story, Conrad makes a point of showing how the moral dilemma which Leggatt's presence evokes is dealt with by the captain--but not, I feel, to the captain's credit. The veil and the double motifs in these stories reveal an interesting transformation; though in early Gothic they are little more than plot devices, they become in Conrad central concerns, through which the interpretations of his stories may be effected. Thus, as I have tried to show, Gothicism, far from being a minor and short-lived type of fiction which died out in the early part of the last century, exerts a potent and central influence in such literature as Melville's and Conrad's.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.630
Threshold uncertainty score0.929

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.014
GPT teacher head0.147
Teacher spread0.133 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it