Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being considers bullying at different scales—from individual experience to international and interspecies relations. I will study how the novel portrays the great Pacific garbage patch in order to attend to waste—as bullied and rejected matter—and to further an ethics of entanglement where we are always in the process of being constituted through what we might want to reject. Entanglement is hard to conceptualize at a human scale because it largely exceeds its scope. I argue that this novel functions as a discursive instrument by which immense and minuscule scales of being—from the thousands of years it can take for plastic to biodegrade to the few months a jellyfish is expected to live—can be engaged with from the narrative’s human scale. This engagement allows readers to cultivate intimacy with and responsibility for what exceeds them rather than participating in a culture of bullying. I conclude by exploring the alternatives that the novel proposes to bullying which are the Zen Buddhist principle of not-knowing as well as practices of mourning for human and more-than-human losses.
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 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".