<i>Literary Rebels: A History of Creative Writers in Anglo-American Universities</i>. By Lise Jaillant
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Something that should probably be more readily acknowledged is the degree to which literary scholarship proceeds from personal investment: we are many of us the protagonists of the stories we tell about texts. In the preface to Literary Rebels, Lise Jaillant lays her cards on the table in a particularly forthright fashion: once an aspiring novelist, she had become disillusioned both with the tightly-gatekept publishing world and with the creative writing programme in which she later enrolled, hoping that said programme might have a key to one or more gates. She wound up in a postgraduate programme in literary studies, and the rest is history (in both fact and method, in this case). One might wonder about the prudence of admitting that you had submitted an entire Houellebecq manuscript to a prominent French press under your own name to prove a point, but Jaillant’s main observations throughout this fascinating, frustrating, and ultimately deeply uneven study are stubbornly correct: creative writing is indeed a discipline undermined by its own evolving ambitions, and creative writers in the academy do persistently parrot the lie that they are somehow outside the system that sustains them. Literary publishing is a mug’s game, as she originally suspected, and nearly-arbitrary coteries do still decide who rises to the top of the literary field. Literary Rebels aims to add what Jaillant calls ‘book history from below’ (p. 9) to this account, giving the reader access to what I think is genuinely unprecedented detail surrounding the lives and movements of some of creative writing’s most important figures (and, more interestingly, some of its less important ones). But to what end?
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.007 |
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".