Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, and the Responsibility to Protect
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This essay describes a new context for understanding the political stakes of US fiction described as postsecular—namely, the emergence of global human rights consciousness in the later twentieth century. Placing Americanist literary criticism’s recent “religious turn” in dialogue with the field of literature and human rights yields new insights for each, I argue. To demonstrate the benefits of this critical dialogue, I interpret two major novels studied by the “religious turn”—Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead—in relation to the United Nations’ responsibility to protect doctrine, which has reshaped the concept and practice of humanitarian intervention in the twenty-first century. Each novel dramatizes a dying father’s strained deliberations over the ethics of intervention on behalf of a vulnerable child—the subject whose maturation provides the figural foundation for human rights consciousness—against potentially grave harm. Each, moreover, deploys language and concepts of spiritual ambiguity to illuminate ethical and epistemological dilemmas that beset decisions regarding whether or not to intervene. Locating sacredness in the subject of human rights, McCarthy’s and Robinson’s texts enmesh rights claims and spiritual idioms in ways that suggest new critical paths for both Americanists and scholars of human rights and literature.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 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".