Another Way of Seeing: Ecological Existentialism in Cortázar’s “Axolotl”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study provides a reading of Julio Cortázar’s short story “Axolotl” through the dual lenses of ecocriticism and mid-century existentialism. Specifically, the critical perspective of this work is inspired by the writings of existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, and German biologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll. Such an interdisciplinary approach is intended to articulate a unique ecological perspective known as environmental existentialism. This critical approach not only acknowledges the longstanding influence that the existentialist movement has had on environmental scholarship, but also suggests that existentialist concepts are especially relevant to our contemporary ecological moment, and thus should continue to be employed in current ecological discourse. The primary locus of critical attention in this work centers on Sartre’s theory of the Look, Uexküll’s notion of the search tone, and Cortázar’s emphasis on suffering. These concepts are examined in concert to suggest that the correlations between the dominant issues of existentialist thought and our contemporary moment ought to signal to readers the existential threat that the age of the Anthropocene poses, as well as the value of reading texts both old and new through the lens of existential ecocriticism.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 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 teacher head, 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".