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Record W4311051114 · doi:10.1080/1475262x.2022.2147415

Modern nihilism and Naguib Mahfouz’s faith in liberalism

2021· article· en· W4311051114 on OpenAlexaff
Ken Seigneurie

Bibliographic record

VenueMiddle Eastern Literatures · 2021
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicJewish and Middle Eastern Studies
Canadian institutionsSimon Fraser University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsNihilismFaithLiberalismSubtextExistentialismPhilosophyPoliticsIndividualismReligious studiesLiteraturePsychoanalysisTheologyLawArtPolitical scienceEpistemology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

By mid-twentieth century, liberal thought was in crisis. Its victory over fascism ill concealed the empty promise at the heart of liberalism, that freedom defined as an absence of compulsion could substitute for a sense of human purpose. Non-western writers saw this as clearly as Camus, Arendt, Niebuhr, and Marcuse did. This essay regards Naguib Mahfouz’s 1965 novel, The Beggar, as a bid to critically intervene in debates around the crisis of liberal thought. It departs from approaches that see The Beggar as a thematization of political, Existentialist or Sufi discourses. Employing a close-reading method, it shows how the text ironizes its high-profile protagonist’s mid-life crisis and quest for spiritual awakening. Analysis reveals that ostensibly secondary female characters, especially the protagonist’s fourteen-year-old daughter, are part of a palimpsestic subtext that thematizes Christian–Muslim-Christian conversion and the potential role of faith as a corrective to the nihilistic void at the heart of liberal thought.

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 distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.541
Threshold uncertainty score0.925

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.028
GPT teacher head0.271
Teacher spread0.243 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations4
Published2021
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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