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Record W2520944257 · doi:10.14288/cl.v0i226.187498

Reasonably Insane: Affect and Crake in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

2015· article· en· W2520944257 on OpenAlexaff
Ariel Kroon

Bibliographic record

VenueOpen Collections · 2015
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicUtopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Alberta
Fundersnot available
KeywordsOryxAffect (linguistics)SociologyPsychologyEcologyBiology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake, the apocalypse is brought about by the character Crake, who devises and unleashes a virus to wipe out human life. Far from a typical mad-scientist villain who abandons reason and turns against his own society, however, Crake exists in a social milieu that encourages the “mad” prizing of knowledge at the expense of feeling and the routine degradation and oppression of other humans. Drawing on the affect theory of Jonathan Flatley, Lauren Berlant, and Sara Ahmed, I analyze Crake as an exemplary denizen of the “happiness dystopia” that is his society. I argue that Crake’s disanthropic attitude is not recognized by other characters because the scientific and socioeconomic systems are perpetuated by a disaffected response to suffering. Crake does not appear mad, as even his genocidal endgame conforms to the affective logic of his society, effectively camouflaging his methods and motives from detection.

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.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.026
Threshold uncertainty score0.052

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0130.020
Scholarly communication0.0050.003
Open science0.0000.002
Research integrity0.0020.004
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

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 head0.059
GPT teacher head0.262
Teacher spread0.203 · 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

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2015
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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