Bibliographic record
Abstract
While in the last few decades Ian McEwan’s prose progressively moved towards a sort of ‘emancipated realism’, McEwan’s early works – the short story volumes First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1978) and the short novel The Cement Garden (1978), in particular – seem to operate under a rather different representational convention. Horrific imagery apparently borrowed from sources as diverse as the traditional Gothic novel, modern horror films or violent pornography is almost blinding at the surface level – and, in fact, every level of the narrative progresses steadily towards dissolution in a manner reminiscent of the violent strategies of decomposition of avant-garde movements such as Dadaism, surrealism or expressionism, or of the Theatre of the Absurd. These strategies denounce the seemingly realist construction of the texts as a no longer consequential carcass that can only serve as an object of mockery. As the historical avant-gardes have done before him, McEwan offers to his readers, in his early texts, the Enlightenment notion of the consistency and relatability of human experience as a hideous, grinning head on a stick. This article will discuss the correlation between horrific imagery and various narrative and linguistic strategies of textual decomposition in McEwan’s early prose, in an attempt to elucidate McEwan’s particular type of ethical engagement at that point in his career as a writer.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".