The Survival of Non-Productive Labour in Mary Shelley’s <i>The Last Man</i>
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay responds to the question scholars frequently raise in relation to Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), namely what is the purpose of this novel, which portrays the annihilation of the human race by a virus without providing any hope for the regeneration of humanity. This essay argues that even though Shelley’s work spends most of its narrative on the importance of productive labour, both in the pre-plague and the post-apocalypse years, non-productive labour constitutes the remainder that survives disaster. In the novel, Lionel Verney adopts labouring for labour’s sake after he realizes the inability of productive labour to regenerate the world. Similarly, useless labour appears in the novel’s introduction to have the ability to construct a radically new world. This essay concludes with a brief analysis of the role that non-productive labour can perform for the survival of the humanities, whose emphasis on tangible and marketable outcomes, in relation to research and teaching, has been limiting the world-making possibilities of the field.
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.
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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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) | 0.003 | 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 it