Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the “encyclopedic” properties of Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), seeking to define the novel as inherently comparative—that is, providing, in Edward Said's words, “a comparative or, better, a contrapuntal perspective” on the world with no need for a second counterpart text to draw cross-literary parallels. Written from a transpacific narratorial stance of a millennial Vancouver-based daughter of Chinese immigrants, the narrative communicates her secondhand knowledge about the traumatic twentieth-century history of the People's Republic of China, accumulated in multiple alternating substories of ordinary individuals’ “practical past” as opposed to official historiography. The article likens Thien's patchwork storytelling to Jorge Luis Borges's apocryphal “Chinese” encyclopedia and novel, to the premodern equation between language and reality discussed in Michel Foucault's “archaeology of knowledge,” to classical Chinese novels as described by Goethe and Franco Moretti, and to J. S. Bach's polyphonic layout of the Goldberg Variations. Constructing sympathetic networks of music and literature, Do Not Say We Have Nothing facilitates readerly immersion, yet its fictional storyworld may not feel universally plausible. Sharing its writer's experience of teaching Thien in Hong Kong, the article suggests that a critique of the novel's Western, nearly Orientalist standpoint with respect to sensitive issues of recent Chinese history does not dismiss the contrapuntal outlook Thien's readers are invited to adopt beyond their experiential backgrounds. Reading Thien, one learns to hear the world's polyphony. That, and not a comprehensive multitude of facts summarizing a national mentality and coherent knowledge about the world, makes Do Not Say We Have Nothing encyclopedic.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".