Institutions, the Literary Canon, and a “Chronic Outsider”: The Example of Sacvan Bercovitch and the Cambridge History of American Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The essay draws a parallel between the cultural view of the German Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin and the critical stance of the Russian Jewish Canadian and then U.S. scholar Sacvan Bercovitch. With Bercovitch’s “cross-cultural variation” of Benjamin’s vision in mind and his critique of oppositionalism in particular, the essay builds upon Benjamin’s critique of empathy and then turns to Bercovitch’s mediation between empathy and horror – a critical position that sheds light on the latter’s crucial distinction and integration of the aesthetic and cognitive modes of criticism. This distinction/integration, as formulated and variously reiterated in some of Bercovitch’s theoretical essays of the mid 1980s, may be said to have given a foundation and a direction to the whole project of the new Cambridge History of American Literature – a project that began to get underway at Harvard, along with a concomitant and at times misleading and harshly debated reflection on the literary canon, from 1985 onward.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.064 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".