Narrated Counter-Narratives and Assumed Grand Narratives about Contemporary Work: Halle Butler’s The New Me
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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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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".