Branding the Body American: Violence and Self-fashioning from <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> to <i>American Psycho</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This paper argues that The Scarlet Letter and American Psycho occupy particular historical moments in the same national allegory of American self-fashioning. Critical readings tend so see Hawthorne's self as particularly American while overlooking the “American” in Ellis's title. By reading labels, logos, and signs, I show that the self-fashioning depicted in American Psycho is explicitly tied to an idea of nation based on typological exclusionary practices. But, whereas Hawthorne's “A”—for “American”—has the power to transform both its wearer and its interpreters, thus transforming a typological label into an individualized expression of character, the empty logos and designer labels that pervade American Psycho inhibit any such transformation and turn interiority into pathology. Where Hawthorne was the “allegorist of the heart” of the nation, Ellis is the allegorist of the place where that heart used to be.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".