Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The major unresolved critical question regarding Nathanael West's dark modernist novella, Miss Lonelyhearts, is whether or not it offers a scintilla of hope for the future of American culture. Otherwise expressed, is redemption possible, or is the work best read as primarily accusatory, part of the negative school of modernism? This article argues that although a wholly redemptive reading is impossible, the work still possesses extrinsic redemptive value: through the very ferocity of its portrayal of dehumanization and suffering, it prompts the reader to ethical reflection, and oftentimes empathy. This thesis is demonstrated through a close reading of the text and a survey of West criticism up to today, including recent studies linking the author's use of the grotesque with compassion. Finally, in order to better understand Miss Lonelyhearts's redemptive implications, the later theory of Richard Rorty is explored, in particular the epistemological and philosophical claims made in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Of greatest relevance to this study is Rorty's claim that only a common understanding of suffering can form the basis for human solidarity, as well as his belief that the unique imaginative quality of literature allows it to communicate philosophical principles better than philosophy itself.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".