A Postwar Perversion of <i>Testimonio</i> in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s <i>El asco</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya offers a provocative example of postwar cynicism in his 1997 novel <i>El asco: Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador</i>. By telling the story of Edgardo Vega, an emigrant who returns to El Salvador in the mid-1990s after living in Canada for eighteen years, <i>El asco</i> represents the mass exodus of Salvadorans during and after the country’s Civil War (1979–92). Because Vega recounts his story in an oral monologue, his narration recalls the testimonial project of the revolutionary years; however, Vega’s narcissistic story distorts the <i>testimonio</i> to capture the disillusion and contradiction of the postwar years. Through a perversion of the <i>testimonio</i>’s form and content and also by parodying the post-World War II Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, <i>El asco</i>, meaning disgust or repulsion, criticizes El Salvador’s postwar reality and imagines the Salvadoran transnational community. Furthermore, the use of fiction allows Castellanos Moya to denounce the <i>testimonio</i>’s claim on authenticity without abandoning its social project.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".