‘Prick-tease of the soul’: negative dialectics and the politics of Tony Harrison’s <i>v</i>.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper argues that, despite being classified as an unambiguous political statement against the Thatcherite government, Tony Harrison’s v. is a complex exercise in negative dialectics that resists revealing a clear polemical stance. A close reading of the poem, focusing on its structure, its indebtedness to Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, and finally its representation of the female body throughout the narrative, reveals that the politics of v. are unable to articulate themselves in an unambiguous way. The ‘v’ that constitutes a catalogue of ‘versuses’ for the poet-narrator delineates the struggles of the poem: the conflicted poet-narrator against the disaffected skinhead; the poet’s desire to foreground his personal subjectivity against his desire to subsume it; the poet’s insecurities about his masculinity against his desire to create a ‘working marriage’ uniting masculine and feminine. These conflicts play out through the poem without resolution, revealing that neither of the two main characters in the poem, nor the poem itself, present an integrated course of action or even a fully articulated reaction to the socioeconomic moment that Harrison chooses as its setting. Rather than a feasible political stance, Harrison’s v. performs the sort of negative dialectics advocated by Theodor Adorno.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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.
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".