The Subversion of Enlightenment Rationality: On Two Vision-Blocking Metaphors in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present paper bases its arguments around two vision-blocking metaphors in Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians. Revelations of the rich metaphorical meanings of the sunglasses and the blind eyes of the barbarian girl through close readings serve to demonstrate Coetzee’s reflections on and criticism of Enlightenment rationality. As a superb narrator well-versed in the antipathy of modern Western culture, Coetzee arranges in dichotomy the two metaphors similar in form but opposing in essence, so as to propel with their tension the narration forward and highlight the gist of the novel. With the operations of various irrational elements in the text, such as the purification rituals, the dreams, and allusions to myth, he manages to subvert Enlightenment rationality for the sake of getting control of the order of nature.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".