Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay highlights a distinction within contemporary fiction, and uses it to argue for a parallel distinction within a trend of contemporary criticism. It begins by describing similarities between the so‐called “New Sincerity,” most famously associated with American writers such as Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers (though I suggest that it has resonances in Europe as well), and the various turns against “critique,” from scholars including Rita Felski, Sharon Marcus, and Stephen Best, among others. My discussion of the correspondence between these movements centers on the dynamic of recognition, the relationship to a depicted character or event that draws the reader into experiences of understanding and solidarity, and which also provides the basis for self‐reflection. An emphasis on recognition links the literary and critical movements; recognition is essential to what the New Sincerity asks of the reader, and the term has also become a central one for critics of critique, who seek to habilitate it as a subject of scholarly interest. Yet the critical movement has, or should have, a significantly different relationship with recognition than the New Sincerity does. In its most useful iteration, this essay argues, the turn against critique in Anglophone criticism looks (or will look, or should look) less like its cousin in the American novel than like some contemporary fiction from outside the United States – in this case, from Denmark. This essay offers readings of three short stories by Naja Marie Aidt, storiesthat share enough with the New Sincerity to make their departures from it especially salient. Rather than simplyendorsingrecognition – positioning recognitive empathy asdesirable– Aidt's stories offer more measured observations of how recognition works as an already present part of everyday social and political interaction. As well as showing some of the international diversity of recent fiction's interest in intimacy and immediate connection, this distinction may be crucial in establishing the turn against critique as an actionable mode of literary analysis.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.006 |
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".