Bibliographic record
Abstract
Strategically generalizing from a close reading of the character-system and narrative style of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), this article proposes that whimsicality is an aesthetic category of eighteenth-century culture attuned to the specifically agrarian dynamics of commercial capitalism. Situating Sterne’s novel at a major inflection point in British socio-economic history, the article shows how the whimsicality of Tristram Shandy more specifically expresses the custom-bound inertia of the gentry class toward the commercial development of agriculture through rationalization, enclosure, and improvement. As exemplified by Walter Shandy in particular, whimsicality is distinguished as an aesthetic category by its low affective intensity, temporary duration, unproductive disposition, and mimetic structure. The article concludes by tracing the stylistic and characterological shifts of the final three volumes of Tristram Shandy, which result in a tonal polarization between the downwardly mobile Tristram and the increasingly capitalistic Walter, reflecting capital’s tendency to fragment and overcome the traditional elite’s passive resistance to agrarian modernization.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".