Beyond the Collapse of Meaning: Narratives of Monstrosity in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, consisting of The Golden Compass (1995), The Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000), is a composite of multiple narratives in which adult and adolescent monsters enact radically different modes of monstrous meaning. An agentic protagonist that embodies the abject, the monster threatens the stability of subjectivity. It is therefore paradoxically a subject arisen from, and composed of, the abject. The Authority, or God, creates a rigid cultural narrative that supports separation and hierarchy, while Lyra Belacqua, a young adolescent, provides a redemptive vision of monstrosity. Her narrative is empathic and heteroglossic, and the subjective meaning that she creates arises from a multiplicity of abject perspectives.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".