Narrated Counter-Narratives and Assumed Grand Narratives about Contemporary Work: Halle Butler’s The New Me
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay provides an analysis of a post-postmodernist novel, Halle Butler’s The New Me (2019), whose political message is conveyed by the audience’s reconstruction of an authoritative, grand narrative about work as a source of personal fulfilment, which intersects with the main storyline. This authoritative, grand narrative not only informs the narrative communication but also provides the necessary cultural background for Butler’s novel to express its political message—that is, the countering of a normative view about work dynamics in today’s precarious landscape. The audience’s recognition of the interplay of the fictional narrative with a larger one in the background allows the narrative communication to realize its act of “countering.” This essay thus builds on the theory of co-construction (Effron et al., 2019) and counter-narrative approaches (cf. Hyvärinen, 2021, Lueg et al., 2021) to argue that Butler’s novel creates an interplay between the grand narratives about work now—including the “treatment of labour as a calling” and the myth of meritocracy permeating post-recession U.S. society—, and the counter-telling and resisting actions the characters in this narrative do to attend to political change.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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