The ‘impossible truth’ of writing off the subject: Anne Carson’s decreation poetics and ‘The glass essay’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Advocating a poetics of ‘decreation’ committed to ‘getting Me out of the way’, the experimental poet and classicist Anne Carson has typically invented strangely hybrid, trans-generic forms that resist and subvert conceptions of self, subject, or even an agential ‘center’. Yet auto / biographical questions are foundational to her work, even as it seeks to depart from conventional life writing forms. Taking up the troublesome problem of ‘Me’ in Carson’s work, this article attends specifically to the emergence of Carson’s decreation poetics in ‘The Glass Essay’ (1995). It examines the process of (self) decreation as a relational, anti-subjectivist proposition and as a textual phenomenon that ultimately poses intractable paradoxes for readers, including the paradox of a ’dream of distance in which the self is displaced from the centre of the work, and the teller disappears into the telling’ (Carson 2005: 173).
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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 | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 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".