Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1937 Harold Hersey pointed out in Pulp Editor that pulps had two components, tawdry tales of crime and horror (and westerns) and advertising for magical cures for human frailty and inadequacy – ‘parallel lines spoken by two sets of people with but a single thought’. Both played to anxiety, and it is that anxiety that concerns this essay. Speaking to a primarily working-class readership, this anxiety is distinct from that inspired by upward mobility in a middle class that survived the Depression and was saved from impoverishment by the war – an anxious imperative to have and to be more. Ads in the pulps targeted a working class positioned as both under-educated and de-skilled in the rapidly rationalizing economies of the Depression and World War II. Building on Deleuze and Guattari's notion of a minor literature as a deflection from the majority position, this essay argues for reading the pulps – stories with lurid covers in both magazines and in books – as a distinct expression of a minority exception to the increased regulation of daily life, and to the normative requirements of upward mobility. Woolrich was, more often than not, the author of despair, of regret, and of futility – of pathology as objection.
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 | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".