“I Am Resisting Narrative Here”: The Vietnam War, Postmodernism, and the Ends of American Power in Joan Didion's <i>Democracy</i>
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Set in spring 1975 during the final months of the US war in Southeast Asia, Joan Didion's novel Democracy (1984) incorporates and dismantles four narrative tropes undergirding the projection of American power during the Cold War: first, the so-called Puritan errand into the wilderness, made central by scholars such as Perry Miller in the 1950s; second, the frontier, revitalized by Kennedy's 1960 New Frontier campaign; third, the United States as enlightenment nation, a metaphor of illumination set in cruel relief by its use of atomic weapons; and, finally, the image of the American republic, a self-conception thrown into crisis by the Cold War's apparatuses of state secrecy and surveillance. Drawing these tropes into her own disintegrating narrative, Didion demonstrates that the US war in Vietnam marks the bankruptcy of these self-images, a critique of grand national narratives that, in turn, comprehends the war as essential to registering the emergence of postmodernism.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.022 |
| 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 it