Bibliographic record
Abstract
While Beckett’s fiction has commonly been seen as opposing or subverting received forms of literary realism, this essay develops an alternative conception of the Irish author’s relationship to fictional realism. The critical narrative of Beckett as opposing such past forms effectively reproduces progressive models of literary history and development. According to such models, modernism comes after realism, superseding it, offering innovative versions of literary form. In fact, narrative operations and reflections in Beckett’s French fiction of the 1940s and early 1950s constitute a point of resistance to the critical narrative of modernist literary-historical progression. At odds with this developmental narrative, this strand of Beckett’s work suggests a vestigial logic: seemingly outmoded literary forms, associated with nineteenth-century realism, still kick around as ruins in the aftermath of high modernism and its anti-narrative impulses. At issue here, then, is a challenge to an established model of modernism, what Michael North has called ‘the progressive model’ of modernism – modernism as a series of innovations comparable to progress in the sciences. While critical accounts of Beckett’s fiction have, explicitly or implicitly, been content to insert this work into this progressive framework, this fictional work is itself engaged in a critical resistance to and departure from this model of modernism. This essay argues that the implications of these operations of Beckett’s French fiction are clarified once they are situated as part of a theoretical-artistic discourse, extending from the late eighteenth- to the twentieth century, on the overlapping categories of literary realism and artistic naiveté. This theoretical framework, in which the essay situates Beckett’s narrative reflections, involves a critical departure from progressive models of literary development, and enables a re-conception of his place in the firmament of modernist literary experimentation.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".