Wars for Oil: <i>Moby-Dick,</i> Orientalism, and Cold-War Criticism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Beginning with Edward Said's reflections on the media fall-out post 9/11, the ideological representations of which he likens to the mythical drama enacted in Moby-Dick, the article goes on to revisit the consensus achieved in Cold-War criticism of the novel in light of our awareness of the cultural construction of recent events. Specifically, the article questions the dichotomizing of the novel in terms of East and West and the critical casting of Fedallah and Ahab as scapegoats for collective guilt, drawing on the work of René Girard on the subject. In this way, it confirms the analogical justness of Said's evocation of Moby-Dick in relation to America's “collective imagination” of its relationship to the Near East and argues the book's power to re-orient and subvert that very representation by revealing both its mythical core and the collective acts of violence it seeks to conceal or sanction.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.067 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".