Bibliographic record
Abstract
At 90, Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) remains a deeply relevant novel for today’s readers. Yet, as Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s prescient quote suggests, Passing’s meaning, from its publication date onward, was never stable or concrete. In fact, the novel’s very brilliance, with its designed ambiguity and invitation for interpretation, has been its capacity to mean a myriad of things to a myriad of readers, now for almost a century. The history of Passing—or the story of Larsen’s story—then is its own compelling and instructive narrative, as each successive generation has actively and even literally projected its own needs, desires, and anxieties upon Larsen’s groundbreaking work. As a result, Passing’s history, with its radical swings in reception and reputation, has been as remarkable as that of any work in American literature. Over the past nine decades, Passing has gone from critically acclaimed (late 1920s) to totally obscure and out-of-print (1930-1969) to socially relevant but underappreciated (1970s-early 1980s) to massively significant and canonized (mid-1980s-present). Today Larsen’s novel is considered a landmark work in the fields of African American and American literature, feminism, queer studies, modernism, interracial literature, and the history of American race. Hundreds of books, scholarly articles, and dissertations have taken the novel as their focus. Yet, even within Larsen’s own compact catalogue, Passing has never held a fixed role. In the essay that follows, I will trace the rich history of Larsen’s novel, arguing that this record of publication and reading provides us with critical insight not just into the shifting interpretation of an important novel but also into how America has understood—and continues to understand, and will continue to understand—race, gender, sexuality, and ultimately, those who do not easily fit into its prescriptive categories.
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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.041 | 0.009 |
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".