Mediation Through the Dead in White Noise and the Poetry of Robert Lowell
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots,” muses Jack Gladney rather mysteriously at one point in White Noise. In his inspired and original essay, Sam Krueger takes Jack at his word, invoking the motif of death to argue convincingly that there are significant parallels between Don DeLillo’s novel and Robert Lowell’s 1964 volume, For the Union Dead. A late modernist confessional poet like Lowell and postmodern comic satirist like DeLillo might seem to make unlikely gravemates, but Krueger discovers some surprising affinities. Both Jack and Lowell are struggling with “the burden of their consciousness,” he argues, and for both, death plays an important role in that struggle. Throughout the novel, Jack is striving to find ways to overcome his fear of death; Lowell, more complexly, turns to a “union with dead writers [which] has the effect of sustaining life.” The paradoxical conclusion that both seem finally to come to is that, as Krueger nicely puts it, “a meaningful life means a meaningful death; the two are inextricably linked.” —Dr. David H. Evans
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 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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".