Literary form, hierarchies and the meeting of two plots in Patrick Gale’s ‘A Slight Chill’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article incorporates Gerald Prince’s and Caroline Levine’s work on form to reveal some of the innovations in Patrick Gale’s ‘A Slight Chill’ ([1996] 2018). This short story juxtaposes two antagonistic plots: the vampire Lotta Wexel’s gastronomic activities and her teacher Angel Voysey’s romance. By attending to, and drawing connections between, smaller forms (e.g. allusions and metaphors) and larger ones (plots and genre), I argue that we may better understand Gale’s project. Lotta’s plot effectively exposes and frustrates Angel’s. In foregrounding such interactions, he encourages the reader to reassess both the affordances and the inadequacies of the models and expectations that Angel inherits. This article goes on to analyse Gale’s screenplay for his upcoming film adaptation to show how he gives a new application to his earlier project. If the short story is particularly invested in the decisions before Angel, then the screenplay explores, even more so than its source material, how and why we categorize characters into hierarchical forms. This article contributes to knowledge, then, by examining Gale’s writing programme, which has received inadequate scholarly attention; by illuminating some of its complexities; and by demonstrating the value of thinking about the short story in terms of form.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".