Diegetic Pregnancy in Jesse Greengrass’s Sight (2018), or the Ethics of Building Bodies in(to) Literature
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although they have often been used as metaphors for the act of writing, pregnancy and childbirth have a long history of being left out of literature itself, especially as diegetic events in the novel. Jessie Greengrass’s novel Sight (2018) provides us with a rare pregnant narrator and as such includes pregnancy as a diegetic event and as a theme. Starting with the assessment that pregnancy in literature can be summed up by the image of “a man pac[ing] a carpet” while a woman gives birth outside the frame of the narration, Greengrass’s novel tackles the compulsion to look and to look away, to show and to hide that is at the heart of this image. The novel shows that pregnant bodies have been overlooked by literature not for lack of curiosity, but rather because of an obsessive curiosity for what lies inside them and what comes out of them. By investigating scientist/object relationships alongside mother/daughter relationships, Sight formulates the beginning of an ethics of looking at and of writing about bodies, which lies in a practice of parenthood that acknowledges both curiosity for and discomfort with bodies. The novel thus deconstructs the metaphor of writing as pregnancy and childbirth and points to an ethical way of incorporating bodies, especially female ones, into literature.
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.
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 | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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