Detecting Meaninglessness and Meaning in Don DeLillo’s <i>Players</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article discusses Don DeLillo’s Players as a critique of the media and the extent to which our lives are shaped and influenced by our interaction with the detective and thriller genres. Drawing upon Baudrillard’s definition of the hyperreal and Jameson’s understanding of postmodernity, I explore the novel’s depiction of Lyle and Pammy Wynant’s journey as a reaction against the controlling nature of the media, and the couple’s experience of the world through the detective and thriller genres. I argue that DeLillo’s Players provides penetrating insights into the extent to which our postmodern cultural moment is deadly to the individual. I suggest that the defining features of the novel’s characters are their subjection to the anonymizing processes of the media and their sense of dissatisfaction and yearning for escape and adventure.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| 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".