Toward a Posthumanist Sublime in Jane Austen’s Persuasion: Lyme Regis in the Anthropocene
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The sublime is a scale relationship between humans and powerful nonhuman nature. In this brief reflection on Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion, I consider how Austen carefully approached the sublime in her description of the wildness of nature at Lyme Regis, where humans (her characters) and the nonhuman nature meet, within the context of the Anthropocene. Whereas modern humanist conceptualizations of ‘the sublime’ privilege human reason and culture as triumphant forces of transcendence over a violent terrifying nature (see, for example, Kant; Burke), I argue that Austen’s writing in Persuasion (1817) anticipates a posthumanist form of the sublime that attends to an inseparable “naturalcultural” (Barad 2007, 91) or human nonhuman practices. This form of posthumanism, as explained by Ferrando (2013), rethinks “the representationalist [sic] and constructivist radicalizations of late postmodernity, which ... lost track of the material realm” (30).
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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 | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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.
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".