“All Things Go to Decay”: Decadence in the Early Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article examines the functions of decadence, understood as both a rhetoric of personal, cultural, or civilizational decay and a logic of historical change, as it appears in the early journal writings and first published essay of the American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. This article seeks to show, through a close survey of these early writings, that Emerson’s fascination with decadence is not an incidental folly of youth that was quickly outgrown, as is often supposed, but instead provides a crucial infrastructure for the development of the hallmark Emersonian ideas of compensation and self-reliance. By pursuing this line of inquiry, the article makes the case for a more nuanced consideration of Emerson’s status in nineteenth-century American studies and a greater engagement with his work in the field of decadence studies.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".