To Hold the World Visible: Writing and History in the Work of Mohammed Dib
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation proposes a broad reading of the work of the Algerian francophone writer Mohammed Dib, some 30 volumes of novels, poetry, stories, and nonfiction writing published between 1952 and 2003. It reads a tension in Dib's work between the visible, the immediately given details of life and transmissible structure of meaning, and the invisible, larger structures or processes that link disparate elements without being themselves describable. Such a tension can be translated into the languages of Islamic mysticism, phenomenology, or a philosophy of history, all discourses that guide the investigation of Dib's work. The dissertation proposes that for Dib an acknowledgement of the invisible as an underlying unity connecting its various manifestations, a flux of experience not divisible into separate categories of object and subject, or a course of events exceeding the control and grasp of definable actors does not lead to escapism or rejection of reality, but to a return to the visible, to increased attention to the details of everyday life and the observable world. The act of writing, for Dib, involves holding to the world, even though the words that link writer and reader are only shadows of the events they witness or the processes that produce them. The dissertation's first half focuses on Dib's writing technique and influence, situating him in 20th-century French and francophone literary theory, tracing his adoption of Arab-Islamic, North African, and Sufi literary and aesthetic traditions, and analyzing how conscious experience forms and dissolves in his presentation of landscape and in childhood. The second half turns to his treatment of historical events, mainly those of Algeria through the colonial period, the war of independence, the post-independence period, and the civil war of the 1990s. Dib's commitment to the perspective of the marginalized, search for a way of presenting history that does not condemn the details of everyday life to insignificance, and attention to the role of imagination lead to criticism of colonial, bureaucratic, and apocalyptic attitudes as attempting to escape the given world, and searches for a use of history that undoes, rather than reinforces, physical and symbolic acts of exclusion.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".