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Record W234193523 · doi:10.5325/style.45.2.0330

The reader and the space-in-between

2011· article· en· W234193523 on OpenAlex

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

VenueStyle · 2011
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicContemporary Literature and Criticism
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsElement (criminal law)Argument (complex analysis)Space (punctuation)Action (physics)CITESGeorge (robot)PhilosophyLiteratureAestheticsSociologyArtLinguisticsArt historyLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Alan Palmer's essay Social Minds is a very interesting contribution to understanding how literary works enable us to understand the social nature of Here, I concentrate on just the part of Palmer's essay entitled construction of the Middlemarch mind. I accept Palmer's characterization that, as he puts it: within the Middlemarch storyworld, the town actually and literally does have a mind of its own. I have pointed out (Oatley, Best Laid Schemes) that, in Middlemarch, George Eliot sets up a space in which there are four principal elements: events of characters' inner worlds (which Palmer calls intramental), settings, happenings and behavioral events that include direct speech and descriptions of actions, and the voice of the narrator. It seems to me that Eliot creates what Winnicott has called a space-in-between. My argument in 1992 was that Eliot does this to invite the reader to become another element in this space, another mind, taking part a dialogue in a way discussed by Bakhtin. Palmer points out that the passage of 50 lines that he cites contains no free indirect thought. There are, however, some references to intramental elements: for instance it's said that Dorothea's mind yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world. There are also no direct depictions of speech or action, though actions are described indirectly, for instance, Celia wore scarcely more trimmings [than Dorothea]. So, in the passage that Palmer cites we are working with one element, the narrator's thoughts as if spoken to us, the readers. Eliot's skill is, however, entirely sufficient to create a space-in-between with just this one element. She does it by splitting the content of the cited passage into two. One part, as Palmer shrewdly indicates, is the mind of Middlemarch. The other includes the narrator's pointers to intramental and behavioral events, which become important in Eliot's promptings to us, the readers, towards an understanding of Dorothea. This splitting into two parts offers Eliot the opportunity for an irony that enables the 50-line passage to come beautifully alive. Although, in the collective mind of the literary academy, Eliot's reputation is for earnestness, this passage has a delicacy of irony every bit as engaging as passages one can find in Jane Austen. And how should Dorothea not marry?--a girl so handsome and with such prospects? Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes and her insistence on regulating life according to notions which might cause a wary man to think twice before he risked himself in such fellowship. What does this irony suggest for the question of the distributed social mind? Two kinds of process, I think. First, the reader is being invited by Eliot to build a mental model of Dorothea, and not just of her as an individual, as psychologists build models of people's personalities. A mental model of a fictional person is called a and, in a novel, character is always (or so I assert) the fictional person in relation to other characters. So the proposal which Palmer makes, that one of the characters in this novel is the town of Middlemarch, is very apposite. As social beings, one of our important mental activities--perhaps our most important mental activity--is to make mental models of others in the group with whom we interact (Dunbar). Otherwise we could not be social in the human way. The irony in the cited passage requires that we recognize the Middlemarch mind, see its coercions and small-mindedness such that we can imagine how these impinge on an intelligent and independent-minded young woman. …

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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: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.960
Threshold uncertainty score0.254

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)0.0000.000

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 head0.042
GPT teacher head0.213
Teacher spread0.171 · 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