Intelligible History, Negated Subjects: The Pressures of Intimacy in Michael Crummey's and Michael Winter's Historical Novels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the implications of Lauren Berlant’s essay “Trauma and Ineloquence” (2001) regarding the therapeutic effects of narrative, also addressing the critical work of other theorists that have tackled the question of the artificiality of personal and historical narratives. By connecting Berlant’s insights into the notion of intelligibility with those of Roland Barthes, of testimony theorists and of other critics on ineloquence, my analysis aims to throw light on two historical novels that are articulated through intimate events that prevent certain speakers (Berlant’s negated subjects) from producing testimony and, therefore, participating in mainstream narratives and accessing justice. The novels River Thieves (2001) by Michael Crummey and The Big Why (2004) by Michael Winter hold the past as a scandal where carnal entanglements degrade the epic sweep of the events and show the disruptive effects of non-normative knowledges. Intimacy, thus defined as a lawless and shameful element in society, intersects with the economic and sexual pressures imported into the colonies by the empire (Povinelli 2006; Stoler 2006a). In this context, Newfoundland, in Canada, represents a colony where the ethics of European and American civilization are called into question.
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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".