Bibliographic record
Abstract
This book examines the aesthetic insurrections enacted by “funny things” in eighteenth-century literature and material culture. It dwells with these details and their cultural associations to model a way of reading that resists the epistemological urge toward resolution . I submit that eighteenth-century fiction furnishes us with these invitations to think and feel in ways not oriented toward “making sense” of what we’ve encountered, and that this reading practice is important to any intellectual or interpretive commitment to resisting and refusing colonialist patterns of epistemological enclosure and appropriation. By disrupting the aesthetic and narrative effects that allowed British readers to experience the material world as mental property, these irreducible details indicate the possibility of ideological malfunctions in the systems of knowledge that took hold in the early stages of British imperialism. The book mounts its argument in three parts – “The Anamorphic,” “The Ludic,” and “The Orificial” – each focused on a specific mode of distorting the forms and logics of emergent liberal norms in the context of empire, including realism, empiricism, ownership, individualism, and gendered heterosexuality. In each of these sections, I approach a detail from an eighteenth-century text – focusing primarily on works by Eliza Haywood, Horace Walpole, Richard Bentley, and Frances Burney – as a prompt to consider the intertwined ways that funniness operates as an aesthetic, a heuristic method, and a reading praxis. The distortions that render things “funny,” I argue, generate a nascent politics that refuses the rigidity of given realities and their parameters of plausibility, and leans into the prospect – or, more accurately, the feeling – that the world as we know it could be otherwise.
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 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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.529 | 0.377 |
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; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
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".