The Power of Words: Disrupting Genre in the Neo-Slave Narrative
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract\nThis thesis will examine the three neo-slave narratives Flight to Canada (1976) by Ishmael Reed, Kindred (1979) by Octavia Butler, and Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison. The narratives take their inspiration from classic American slave narratives. However, written a century and more after the abolition of slavery, they differ in form, style, and content. The novels are published in the post-civil rights era, and they reflect the rise of the African American need for self-representation developed out of civil rights activism in the ‘60s. The thesis will explore how the three neo-slave narratives disrupt genre boundaries in the spirit reflected by postmodernism, and as follows these narratives manage to depict slaves and their testimonies in a new way. The thesis will argue that the novels share a common goal. In their shared aim to experiment with genre, Reed, Butler, and Morrison create hybrid forms of novel-writing and story-telling. Consequently, the thesis will examine how the disruption of genre boundaries creates fantastic hybrid novels that weaken conventions of linearity and the distinctions between past and present. Additionally, in the spirit of Lyotard and postmodernism, the authors consider the grand narrative and objective truths to be gone. This creates room for a multitude of subjective voices which stand forth as an intersubjective project that wants to present an alternative slave (hi)story.\n\nKeywords: Genre-disruption, intertextuality, genre-hybridity, fragmentation, historical anachronism, blurring of time and space, meta-fiction, multivocality, (re)memory, trickster characters, ghosts, Neo-HooDooism, relativism of storytelling, genealogy, and the collective community.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".