Introduction: The Twenty-First Century Social Novel in French
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Upon awarding the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature to Annie Ernaux, the jury noted that her œuvre ‘examines a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language and class’, adding that ‘she with great courage and clinical acuity reveals the agony of the experience of class’.1 In 2018, Nicolas Mathieu won the Goncourt Prize for Leurs enfants après eux, a novel about class differences and youth in the deindustrialization context of North Eastern France. A commentator remarked that ‘Nicolas understands the destitute, the working class, in a way that most writers don’t’.2 Since 2014 and the critically acclaimed En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, Édouard Louis has likewise been committed to shedding light on his childhood in a poverty-stricken village in the North of France and regularly examines how politics affects the lives of working-class individuals, because it is a matter of ‘life or death’.3 In the same vein, Mauritian-French writer Nathacha Appanah's work, including Tropiques de la violence (2016), plunges the reader into the intimacy of its characters while discussing social injustice, marginalization and immigration in a slum in Mayotte; Haitian writer Kettly Mars's Aux frontières de la soif (2013) denounces the precarious post-earthquake living conditions of those living in refugee camps and their experience of poverty, famine or prostitution; Cameroonian writer Djali Amadou Amal's Les Impatientes (2020) examines the feminine condition among the Peuls in Cameroon; and Québécois writer Kevin Lambert's Querelle de Roberval (2018), a queer ‘fiction syndicale’, tells the story of a strike in northern Quebec and explores conflict, desire and domination. All of these writers make contributions to the contemporary social novel genre, as they seek to raise awareness about social issues, injustices and the conditions of the working class and marginalized groups.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.029 | 0.004 |
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".