“Because Survival is Insufficient”: Pandemic Narratives in the 21st Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper explores the configuration of pandemics in Such Is This World@sars.come (2011) by Chinese writer Hu Fayun and Station Eleven (2014) by Canadian American author Emily St. John Mandel to examine the paradigm shifting effect of disease on people’s ideas, beliefs, value systems, social structures, as well as political and religious entities. The researcher chose these texts because the literature that arose as a response to previous pandemics reverberates into the present and speaks to the current moment in deep and insightful ways, helping people make sense of the challenges of COVID-19. The paper maintains that pandemic literature holds up a mirror to the readers’ deepest and most pressing concerns about the present moment and examines diverse possible responses to those fears. Moreover, it shows them that the boundaries that people use to structure society are fragile and unstable. Accordingly, the paper attempts to position the two novels as a response to and a repository of 21st century fears about globalization, state hegemony and surveillance, people’s increasing reliance on technology and community identity. The paper argues that while pandemic literature as a genre might initially seem as relevant only to its particular moment of production and consumption as it addresses specific kinds of medical fears, a deeper look reveals it has boundary crossing capabilities as it reflects multifaceted, wider reaching human concerns. Hence, one can argue that pandemic literature can be viewed as a repository of both archetypal, primordial concerns about human survival and extinction, as well as time specific and culture-bound fears. The paper maintains that in addition to their delineation of tangible medical threats, these texts allow their authors and readers to think about unsettling questions about the human condition and what it means to be human even amid the anticipation of extinction and which human traits are deemed as worthy of protection, continuity and/or sacrifice.
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 | 0.013 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| 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 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".