Dissolving Critiques: Capitalism and Space-time in the American Novel, 1888 - 1996
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dissolving Critiques examines the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American novel’s critical engagement with the conditions of life under capitalism. Reading works of realism, naturalism, and utopian fiction through M.M. Bakhtin’s theory of the literary chronotope, I argue that the novels under consideration render the capitalist production of space legible as a social injustice antithetical to the ideals of freedom and human flourishing and represent capitalism’s transcendence as an imperative of reason. However, I also contend that these critiques risk dissolving, as the texts confront and inevitably fail to manage the seemingly irresolvable problems inherent in their own progressive desires. In choosing “dissolve” as a key term, I mean to highlight the term’s potential visual, “scenic” qualities, for like a film dissolve, the dissolving critique seems to offer one scene of possible alternative that then dissolves back into the original scene, as though unable to hold. In this sense, the dissolving critique exposes the mechanisms of narrative failure. But although such dissolution inevitably disappoints any progressive desires of a reader/critic such as myself, I also argue that even when the critical image dissolves, a lingering sense of possible alternatives to capitalism remains—like afterimages in a scene.
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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".