Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues for a camp reading of Prevost’s 1731 novel Manon Lescaut, which opens with unabashed melodrama: a beautiful woman in chains, a lover who follows her to the ends of the earth, locals in an enigmatic frenzy, and a beneficent stranger. Hyper-theatricality here plants the possibility of a specific yet atypical reading—one that escapes the banality of melodrama and redeems the “total abjection” (to use David Halperin’s phrase) of failed tragedy, by reveling in Camp’s signature excesses of spectacle, artifice, comic distance, incandescent jusquaboutisme, and flamboyant disregard for the strictures of good taste. In contrast to other approaches that look beyond taking Manon seriously as either a dogmatic moral fable or a tragedy of passions, this reading does not delve critically into the complexities of eighteenth century society or problematize gender relations. Rather, it exploits a comic sensibility that Manon shares with Susan Sontag’s portrayal of Camp in her iconic 1964 “Notes.” Camp’s eye for hilarity in “seriousness that fails” and the prizing of jouissance over judgmentalism prove especially well attuned to the novel’s sense of wonder at the “bizarreries du coeur humain.” Because Camp does not moralize or psychologize, this reading pulls Manon away from the manicheism of conventional morality. Rather than rely on dichotomies of “good” and “bad,” a taste for Camp intervenes to create a “third axis” for moral reflection, which I illustrate through detailed focus on Tiberge as an incorrigible forgiver and on Des Grieux’s abortive homecoming as a spoof of the Prodigal Son.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".