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Record W4410795375 · doi:10.1080/14791420.2025.2506797

Carnival rhetoric: resisting absurdity qua absurdist performance

2025· article· en· W4410795375 on OpenAlexaff
Zhaozhe Wang

Bibliographic record

VenueCommunication and Critical/Cultural Studies · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicLiterature, Film, and Journalism Analysis
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAbsurdityRhetoricAbsurdismLiteraturePhilosophyArtLinguistics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This article explores carnival rhetoric’s resistive potential in a global, non-Western counterculture through an unprecedented Halloween carnival in Shanghai, China. Theorizing carnival rhetoric as a symbolic, embodied act of resisting absurdity qua absurdist performance, it draws on Bakhtin’s concepts of carnival, laughter, and grotesque realism to examine its rhetorical potency in cultural counternarratives. Ultimately, the article argues that in places where public rhetoric is conditioned by the unchecked power of algorithms, populists, authoritarian regimes, digital platforms, corporations, and interest groups, carnival rhetoric creates a liberating space of resistance for the disenfranchised and marginalized to temporarily escape the disciplinary confinement of absurdity.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.006
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.010
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.012
Threshold uncertainty score0.034

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0060.010
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0120.037
Scholarly communication0.0090.006
Open science0.0010.008
Research integrity0.0020.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.068
GPT teacher head0.345
Teacher spread0.277 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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