“I Am Resisting Narrative Here”: The Vietnam War, Postmodernism, and the Ends of American Power in Joan Didion's <i>Democracy</i>
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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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".