To Read or Not to Read Dickens in the Twenty-First Century: What If He Needed to Be Read Twice?,
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper I try to reassess Dickens by confronting his late novels to those of some eminent Adventure writers, Doyle, Stevenson, but also Conrad. Despite their seemingly widely different styles and literary aims, they all contribute to build, in the second half of the nineteenth century, a coherent and autonomous, though still quite furtive, literary movement, in between Realism and Modernism, a movement that I will attempt to define and circumscribe. I would like to show that Dickens’s novels resemble in many crucial respects those of these writers of Adventure, that they share the same crucial preoccupations with finding a way out of Realism, and experiment on different technical ways to dismiss the Realist system. I will of course concentrate on the ‘strange case’ of Charles Dickens, a case of ‘impure,’ or ‘self-dissolving’ Realism: in his fundamentally dual, self-contradicting novels, Dickens manages to build the most solid, coherent, incontestable texts, while he also develops, within the novels themselves, a dissident counterproposal, an intimate deconstruction. In this respect, Dickens, like his famous fellow literary adventurers, situates himself in a very intense literary period and contributes to creating it by writing ‘in the middle,’ in a still undefined theoretical space, away from Realism, but not yet caught in the Modernist system: they settle in the unstable state of imminence they historically find themselves in, and methodically explore its literary possibilities.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".