Reconciling Aesthetics of Presence as Poesis in the works of NourbeSe Philip and Robin Blaser
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This project, upon taking a close look at the poetics of NourbeSe Philip and Robin Blaser, investigates how centralizing absence as integral to the postmodern poetic process is actually antithetical to the aim of bringing others forward1. I argue that in order for a writer to enter humility and bring others forward, she must first understand her own presence in the world. This project interrogates a key concern for contemporary Canadian poets, the ‘lyrical I’; that is, should poetics involve minimizing or eradicating the ‘self’ in the pursuit of the dialogical function of poetry “rather than be a vehicle for ‘personal expression’ or inscription of individual experience?” (Mossin, "In the Shadow of Nerval: Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, and the Poetics of (Mis) Translation.” 673) The fact that this sentiment, promulgated by poststructuralism’s paradigmatic evacuation from liberal humanism in the 1960’s was popularizing just as laws and social policies concerning Black civil rights and women’s rights were being challenged necessitates a hard look the implications poststructuralism has for historically marginalized and colonized writers, especially given the current political climate of Black Lives Matter and Me Too. This project also examines what is lost when we adopt a mode of aesthetics that rejects narrative, and any regard to the interconnectedness (or ‘interbeing’, a term coined by Thich Nhat Hanh) of history, culture, and identity as key to the development of critical theory and discourse.To elucidate these issues along with the erasure of the non-Western antecedents that led to the development of literary theoretical pursuits across the West, I lean on the critical works of Julia Kristeva, with particular attention to her concept ‘abjection’, Frantz Fanon’s ‘sociogeny’, and Edouard Glissant’s ‘relationality’.
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 | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.091 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".