Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent scholarly work in the interdisciplinary field of suburban studies has focused on the analysis of suburbia as an increasingly heterogeneous phenomenon, thus departing from previous assumptions that the suburbs are uninteresting enclaves of uniformity and conformity. However, in spite of some significant advances, the exploration of the suburban landscape is often heavily invested with fixed symbolic meanings, which claim either utopian or dystopian discourses. In light of this, Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia – or the notion of alternative spaces that mirror the culture at large – serves as a useful tool for overcoming this binary (Beuka 7). This thesis aims at examining the complex representations of the heterotopian suburban landscape in Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides (1993) and Barbara Gowdy’s Falling Angels (1989). While set in different geographical locations – Eugenides’s in the United States, and Gowdy’s in Canada –, both novels cast a critical glance at the lights and shadows of the North American suburban dream, unpacking the supposed universality of suburbia and allowing for the identification of significantly recurring patterns. The analysis of these two novels will focus on three different, but thoroughly intertwined aspects. In the first place, the constructions of female and male identities within the heterosexual matrix will be addressed through Judith Butler’s work on gender relations (Gender, Bodies). Secondly, the violence implied in the demand for a coherent and shared suburban identity will be mainly related to Richard Sennett’s observations on “the myth of community solidarity” (36). Finally, Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism” will be applied to the mechanisms of desire that keep the characters physically and emotionally bound to their environment. This thesis attempts to contribute to bridging the gap between utopian and dystopian fictionalized suburbs and to inspire future research in the growing field of critical suburban studies. References Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011. Beuka, Robert. SuburbiaNation. Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” 1993. Routledge, 2014. ---. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990. Eugenides, Jeffrey. The Virgin Suicides. Bloomsbury, 1993. Gowdy, Barbara. Falling Angels. 1989. Bloomsbury, 1991. Sennet, Richard. The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life. W.W. Norton & Company, 1992.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".