The Satire of Gerontophobic Ableism in Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori: A “Salutary Scar”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, the COVID‑19 pandemic highlighted the widespread reality of ableism and gerontophobia in many societies, as older and disabled people faced institutional violence. In examining a Scottish 20th‑century novel, Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori (1959), this paper investigates how Spark denounces institutional violence through satire, termed satire of “gerontophobic ableism” here. Described by Spark as a “salutary scar”, satire denounces imbalanced care relations in medical institutions in the novel. This paper investigates how the ageing characters become increasingly socially marginalised, as their non‑normative bodies and minds are deemed unproductive to capitalist society, and examines how studying their marginalised experiences can reveal central, societal issues.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".