William Peter Blatty's <i>The Exorcist</i> and Rhetoric–Dialectic Interplay
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article closely analyzes a partnership between the literary, rhetorical, and dialectical dimensions of William Blatty's The Exorcist (1971), a popular horror novel about a twelve-year-old girl possessed by an ancient demon, Pazuzu. The Exorcist navigates the theological understanding of transcendental unity—Beauty, Goodness, and Truth (found in the theories of Plato, Thomas Aquinas, and contemporary Thomists). The “evil” dimensions of The Exorcist (ugliness, sin, and lies, respectively) counterpoint the beauty–goodness–truth relationship; consequently, Blatty's horrific/repulsive elements highlight the role of Catholic truth, heighten the dialectical function of Catholic theology, and enhance the power of argumentation within a literary work. By closely unpacking several dialogues within Blatty's The Exorcist, this article establishes the novel as an accessible piece of “Catholic horror” that persuasively guides popular audiences through modes of theological argumentation toward sites of Catholic understanding.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".