Bodies in Space in Christine Montalbetti’s <i>La vie est faite de ces toutes petites choses</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In La vie est faite de ces toutes petites choses, Christine Montalbetti recounts the NASA STS-135 mission with great precision, omitting no bodily detail or even insect. She foregoes a grandiose narrative to linger on minutiae, emphasizing that space travel, despite being an extraordinary event, continues to entail quotidian concerns. I study how Montalbetti uses the atypical setting of outer space to draw attention to common human experiences, and, in particular, the physical aspects of daily life that are perhaps overlooked on Earth. As Montalbetti reminds us, we always have a body. Even if we might not be bodies in outer space, we are always bodies in space. Earth, as she insists, is a shared space, populated not only by humans but also by numerous other living organisms. I demonstrate that, as the novel progresses, Montalbetti questions the distinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary. For her, the most habitual of activities, being a body interacting with other living beings in a shared space, is, itself, the most extraordinary thing. The STS-135 mission, then, exemplifies not the possibility of independence from the Earth, but rather the interconnectedness of all living beings.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".