Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper argues that the psychological mechanism of disavowal is at the heart of modernist conceptions of difference from the Victorians. It identifies the focal point of this disavowal in the overt repudiation of spiritualism and spectrality in key pronouncements by Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf. By reading those pronouncements closely, and comparing them to the use of spectrality and spiritualism in these writers’ novels, this paper argues that these key foundational figures of literary modernism enact a powerful case of disavowal. Though they explicitly deplore the use of the supernatural, Conrad and Woolf rely upon it in their fiction. This specific dual disavowal – of the Victorian precedent and of a lingering supernaturalism in their own work – is not just limited to Conrad and Woolf, but, I argue, informs the larger means by which the modernists strove to understand and articulate their break with the Victorians. Disavowal of the supernatural stands at the origin of modernist self-conception, anchoring the challenge to “make it new” directly in a matrix of ethico- aesthetic concerns.
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 | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.066 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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.
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".