Calvino’s Encounter with the Animal: Anthropomorphism, Cognition and Ethics in <i>Palomar</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the importance of the portrayal of animals in Palomar, Italo Calvino’s last major work of fiction. The discussion moves from some observations on the representation of animals in fiction, to a reflection on the ethical issues which emerge once the “question of the animal” is confronted in its full complexity. It is argued that this is precisely the question that Calvino’s work addresses. Mr Palomar’s trajectory is marked at key junctures by encounters with animals. A close reading of the passages which describe these encounters reveals not only Palomar’s cognitive impasse, but also that at the root of this impasse lies a fundamental ethical failure which the protagonist is incapable to acknowledge. Palomar’s escapist strategies ultimately amount to a refusal of life itself and lead the author to liquidate his protagonist at the end of the narrative.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 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".