Book and Literary-Life Imaginaries: A Historical, Sociological and Socio-Critical Project
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What can works of fiction about the literary life teach us about books, publishing, reading, and about the people who animate the communications circuit? As representations of the writer’s own milieu, novels that portray the literary life possess a particular reflexive knowledge about the universe of the book. It is to this astonishingly vast corpus from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century that the GREMLIN (Groupe de recherche sur les médiations littéraires et les institutions) has dedicated the core of its work. The publication of essay collections and special journal issues (Fictions du champ littéraire et Bohème sans frontière in 2010, “Le livre dans le livre” in 2011, Imaginaires de la vie littéraire in 2012, Romans à clés in 2014) has joined the online publication of bibliographies of French and Québécois novels about the literary life and of a vast database containing detailed records of more than 80 novels (see legremlin.org ). Its intense collecting of raw material and analytical articles (about a hundred) has allowed the GREMLIN to map the territory of fictional literary life in France. This paper will endeavour to sketch some of the perimeters (the transmission of the book object, the mise en abyme of the creative process in the fiction itself, and forms of sociability such as salons as sites of encounter among principal fictive actors in the literary life). By way of example, I will examine at length the configuration of the publisher in the French novel. Once almost invisible in French novels of the literary life, characters of publishers later abound. Beginning with the novel that fashioned the lasting fictional image of the publisher, Balzac’s Illusion perdues (1839), I move into the contemporary moment to study (in the case of Échenoz, Pennac, Robbe-Grillet, Christine Angot, etc.) the representation of the publisher – his/her physical traits, places of sociability, social function, and speech. I will show that, contrary to what was usual even into the 1970s, the discourse of the publisher is now often elevated to the level of that of the fictive writer to express resistance to the commercialization of literary production.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.091 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.032 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| 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".