MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4229734839 · doi:10.3138/cras-s035-03-02

"Through a Glass Darkly": Typology in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon

2005· article· en· W4229734839 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Judy Pocock

Bibliographic record

VenueCanadian Review of American Studies · 2005
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicThemes in Literature Analysis
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsLiteratureAllusionNarrativeMetaphorEpigraphOld TestamentRepetition (rhetorical device)Reading (process)HistoryContradictionTypologyPhilosophyArtLinguistics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In a 1981 interview, Morrison told Charles Ruas that "the Bible wasn't part of my reading, it was part of my life" (97). In her use of structure, language, and concepts~~~her use of metaphor, repetition, and reiteration~~~the Bible resonates throughout Toni Morrison's novel, Song of Solomon. Erich Auerbach describes the Bible as a text "fraught with background" (qtd. in Alter, "The Old Testament" 22); the Song of Solomon is a text fraught with the background of the Bible. Here, I concentrate on Morrison's use of biblical names. The novel's epigraph~~~"The fathers may soar and the children may know their names"~~~signals the central role names will play in the novel. Over and over again, characters and places are named, renamed, or misnamed, and more often than not, the Bible is at the centre of this process. The title of the novel and the names of almost all the women and some of the men come from the Bible. Each one of these names evokes complex biblical characters, allusions, metaphors, and narrative cycles that resonate back and forth throughout the text, and each name signals a parallel with, reversal of, or contradiction with a given biblical allusion.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.040
Threshold uncertainty score0.080

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0030.003
Science and technology studies0.0200.028
Scholarly communication0.0090.006
Open science0.0020.008
Research integrity0.0020.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.027
GPT teacher head0.305
Teacher spread0.278 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2005
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueCanadian Review of American StudiesSame topicThemes in Literature AnalysisFrench-language works237,207