Envisioning a ‘good’ utopia on a dystopian island: culinary and cultural conflicts in Lord of the Flies
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thanks to the rising interest in island literary studies, there is a considerable body of research on the relationship between islands and utopia/dystopia, but the motif of food, namely, what characters eat on an island, has seldom been explored. Using Terry Eagleton and Frederic Jameson’s theories on utopia and dystopia as an interpretive lens, and drawing upon the varied contentions regarding food and eating by Levi-Strauss, Paul Atkinson, Carol J. Adams and other theorists, this paper examines the triangular relationship of island, food, and utopia/dystopia in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The paper argues that although this island story is generally categorized as dystopian, it blends both utopian and dystopian discourses and represents a literary endeavour to envision a ‘good’ utopia. This argument is supported by a detailed analysis of how the eating practices of the British schoolboys marooned on a desert island parallel their attempts to construct a desirable microcosm. By vividly depicting the boys’ contrasting culinary patterns of gathering fruit and hunting pigs, Golding subverts the hierarchy built upon the opposition between the raw/vegetable and the cooked/meat and their corresponding implications of ‘the barbarous’ and ‘the civilized.’ His further depictions of the boys’ cannibalism and degeneration into savages showcase his vision of human beings’ universal evil, his doubt about the linear progress of Western society, and his caution about the potential disasters that might befall seemingly progressive civilization due to the fall of mankind.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 it