Deconstructing Post-Industrial American Ethos: Decline of Civility and Agony of Artists in Bellow’s Later Novels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper sheds light on the way Saul Bellow’s (1915–2005) intellectual protagonists deconstruct post-industrial American ethos which are dominated by the hegemony of capitalism and the values of democracy. These heroes are deeply immersed in European liberal education, the ‘Western Canon’ to recall Harold Bloom; however, they are marginalized, alienated, degraded and eventually rejected by the masses, junk culture, the dictatorship of the commonplace, and the unqualified individual. Bellow’s heroes predict that American culture will be overwhelmed by mass culture after the 1950s characterized by liberal democracy, [ultra capitalism], scientific experimentation, and industrialization, inspite of the high rate of higher education. Deploring a Derridean method of deconstructionism and a Foucauldian epistemic design, they archeologically question the roots of American cultural backdrop, that is, the massive industrialization in the late age of capitalism. They centralize art, humanities, classical books, morality, and religion; and marginalize science, commodity, consumerism, technology, and psychiatry. They deconstruct all makers of culture industry based on analysis, systemization, standardization, and not imagination and creativity. To achieve human and noble norms, they admit a noble life away from the vulgarity and barbarism of the age to cite Zygmunt Bauman. Special focus is on Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and The Dean’s December (1982) for their common concern with this issue.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".