Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Spectrality in Modernist Fiction challenges the prevailing view that spectrality articulates melancholic, traumatic, or terminal forms of mourning. Instead, it claims, writers such as Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Mary Butts, and Elizabeth Bowen use the rhetoric of spectrality to explore a logic of tendential utopianism. As these writers engage variously with problems of sex and sexuality, revolution, imperialism, capitalism, and desire, they begin to theorize an ethical perspective that prefigures much contemporary theorization of spectrality and ethics. Driven by a historical period defined by uncertainty, as is our own, these writers haltingly chart a new mode of ethical thought that depends on unmeetable imperatives and unanswerable demands. As they sort these relationships in their fiction, these writers must find ways to articulate values on a shifting continuum in a constantly changing set of contexts. It is ethical thought at its most distilled, when no solution will be adequate and yet some solution must be sought. The result, as Conrad, Forster, Butts, and Bowen demonstrate, is a key element of modernism’s celebrated difficulty: an ethical determination to tackle insuperable problems, issuing in tentative, even contradictory, feints towards potential future resolutions that are equal parts impossible (yet) and necessary. There is hope in these ghosts, not resignation. The impasses encountered are not final, but temporary, and the drive to overcome them embedded in Conrad, Forster, Butts, and Bowen’s spectral rhetoric constitutes a tensile optimism that remains essentially utopian.
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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".