Becoming a "Nation That is Not a Nation": National Image, Lost World Narratives, and American Antarctic Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation identifies the lost world narrative genre as being central to the history and development of American Antarctic literature, a connection which has not previously been explicitly identified, or explored in any sustained way.As a genre, lost world narratives render places that are "outside time," which dovetails with the literary figuration of Antarctica as a place of "frozen" time.These facts converge in the lost world narrative of the American Antarctic literary tradition, in which the Antarctic lost world setting serves as a platform for a conservative, or static, national image of American society which is frequently grounded in discourses of evolution, including pre-Darwinian theories of racial difference, that are mobilized in particular to reflect historically contingent, ideologically-motivated ideas of masculinity and race.Such national images are conservative insofar as they foreground discourses which reflect the values and seek to perpetuate the social power of specific groups (namely, white men).Through its examination of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), Charles Romyn Dake's A Strange Discovery (1899), Edgar Rice Burroughs's Caspak trilogy (1918), H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (1936), and Marvel Comics' Ka-Zar (1965-2011), the present work demonstrates that while these aspects provide a sense of cohesion to American Antarctic literature and do, in fact, help to distinguish it from trends in the Antarctic texts of other nations, ultimately that cohesion only represents the projection of a limited national image based on white masculine social hegemony in the U.S.. Despite this normative vision that they advance, however, these texts also exhibit a strong counter-current that manifests in different ways but always works to break down the surface cohesion provided by the conservative iii national images fostered by American Antarctic lost world narratives.vi
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".