"Laughter in the Dark": Belief and Literature in a Secular Age
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While the “spiritual” nature of contemporary literary fiction is easier to identify in the works of the outright “religious” (e.g., Marilynne Robinson), there are others traditionally viewed by the critical establishment as “secular” (e.g., Jonathan Lethem) for whom the concern is a bit more subversive, a backdoor or, as John McClure puts it in his book, Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (2007), a “crasser” spirituality, so to speak. But even between these two apparent, yet ultimately, false poles—the religious and the secular—there are others for whom the concern falls somewhere in the murky in-between, like Zadie Smith and the late David Foster Wallace. The point is this: in our “secular age,” and I use this term as the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor does in his book A Secular Age (2007)—“a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace”—it seems that writers have not turned their backs on the complex workings of, and more importantly, longings for the “spirit,” however defined. This dissertation argues that at the core of our lived, secular experience, there is a yearning for something more. Indeed, what constitutes that “something” is up for debate. What isn’t, at least for the writers I examine here, is that we all yearn, that there’s nothing esoteric about this chase for what Taylor calls, “fullness.” It’s universal. My claim then is that writing in and perhaps against this secular age betrays a kind of yearning to assuage this common dissatisfaction, a sadness, according to Zadie Smith, so deep “you can taste it in your morning Cheerios.”
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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 | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.062 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| 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".