Her/His- (s)tory: Confronting the “shackles” of the African-American Urtext: Walker, Gaines, Reed Re-write the Slave Narrative
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1966, Margaret Walker published Jubilee. Five years later, Ernest Gaines published his Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. In 1976, Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada was released. In a ten years’ span three prominent figures from the African-American literary world chose to confront the Slave Narrative tradition. These three examples of an attempt at revisiting the literary myth of the Slave Narrative, provide a corpus which offers three different approaches to this literary canon - three significant modalities of confronting the African-American Urtext, in other words the “primal text”. Indeed, the differences in the narrative mode and the overall tone of these works are to be assessed as the expression of the writers’ view on the conceptual interplay between History, historical truth and imaginative truth. What is an African-American writer to do when faced with the African-American Urtext? Is s/he to enter the chain of transmission, manipulate it for educative reasons or deconstruct the myth in order to reveal its actual value? The characters in these three Neo-Slave Narratives as well as their authors ask the fundamental question: can the end always justify the means?
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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".