‘I have heard of the end of writing’: Kristjana Gunnars and Roland Barthes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The work of Icelandic-Canadian writer Kristjana Gunnars crosses genres and confuses the boundaries between fiction, poetry, biography, essay, and theory. This article addresses her relationship to the French literary theorist Roland Barthes. By paying close attention to the texts which mention Barthes specifically, the poem-cycle Carnival of Longing (1989) and the memoir Zero Hour (1991), it is possible to examine the approaches to desire, grief, and writing that give both Gunnars’s and Barthes’s work their enduring relevance. Gunnars reads Barthes against the grain, seeing the fragmentary strategy of A Lover’s Discourse (1979) as a refusal of genre and taking Writing Degree Zero’s (1968) revolutionary strategy of ‘colourless writing’ as a strategy for dealing with grief. An examination of her citations of and allusions to Barthes will show us how Gunnars interprets and remakes theory into poetry.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".