Photographs in Two Works of Life Writing: L’Afrique fantôme by Michel Leiris and L’Africain by J.-M.G Le Clezio
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation looks at the role of photographs in two works of autobiographical, travel-based life writing.Michel Leiris' 1934 travel diary, L'Afrique fantôme features 31 ethnographic photographs taken during a French ethnographic expedition that crossed sub-Saharan Africa at the beginning of the 1930s.J.-M.G.Le Clézio's 2004 memoir L'Africain includes 15 photographs taken by his father, a British medical doctor stationed in remote areas of Cameroon and Nigeria in the 1930s and 1940s.What bringsthese works together in this research has surprisingly little to do with the readily apparent commonalities in subject matter between the two photo sets-peoples and places of the African continent during the high colonial period.Rather, we focus here on text-image relationships, examining how, in each case, the photographs are made to be autobiographical.Taking an intermedial approach to literary studies that raises the photographs up from a subordinate illustrative function, we consider the primarily textual operations that, in plays of meaning and intention, work to appropriate and incorporate into these texts photographs that can be resistant or disruptive to those efforts.Our readings of these works contribute new insight into the use and function of photographs in life writing.
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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 | 0.006 |
| 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 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".