“A National Literature of Irrationalism”: Horror and the Weird as Foundations for an American Literature Survey Course
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While recent pedagogical scholarship has examined how to teach horror and “weird fiction” in the American Literature classroom, there has been no study of the possibility of organizing an entire American Literature survey course around such texts. I elaborate on my own experience teaching such a survey course, which used texts in the American “weird” tradition to examine the whole US literary tradition in terms of the nation’s originary conflict between the forces of reason and unreason. I pay particular attention to the first two weeks of the course, in which we set up this framework through readings of Langston Hughes, The Declaration of Independence, Jonathan Edwards, Michael Wigglesworth, and Phillis Wheatley. I discuss pedagogical considerations underlying the course design, and ways that readers might adapt the course’s principles beyond its immediate context.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| 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 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".