Yearning, Frustration, and Fulfillment: The Return Story in Olive Kitteridge and Kissing in Manhattan
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The use of absence in the short story cycle is an overlooked but vital element of the genre. 1 It contributes to the way that cycles can manipulate the focus in their stories, using developed patterns of absence to influence the reader's response.The technique of the return story is identified by Gerald Lynch in his 2001 book The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles.He describes the return story as the final story in a cycle which returns it back to its origins, spiralling back in on itself to create a meaningful connection to its starting point, often by referencing characters and events which occur throughout the stories (32).Both Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout and Kissing in Manhattan by David Schickler are short story cycles which use absence to develop patterns to direct the focus back into the preceding stories through the contrast presented in the return story.In relation to the structure of the short story cycle, I use the term "absence" to represent elements of the text which are not physically present but which, regardless of their lack of presence, have a noted and significant effect on the cycle as a whole.Absence functions both as an abstract concept that describes the interaction between the reader and elements that are left out of a text and also as a focus of the content of the stories.The cycles present characters who experience a void in life, and the stories describe the characters' respective searches to fill these voids.The two cycles lend themselves to a study of absence within the genre because of this interaction between the structural absences and the absences presented in the content.These absences create the affective experiences of yearning, frustration, and fulfillment for the reader.The absences construct these emotional reactions, which become affective reactions to the text.The repetition of this absence in both texts Yearning, Frustration, and Fulfillment: The Return Story in Olive Kitteridge ...
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 it