A theory of the viability of incest: Djuna Barnes's «Ryder», «The Antiphon» and «Nightwood»
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In her three major works, Ryder (1928), The Antiphon (1958), and Nightwood (1936), Djuna Barnes explores incest as a mode of being and relating. She focuses on the relationships among the Ryders of Ryder, the Hobbses of The Antiphon, and between Nora Flood and Robin Vote of Nightwood as her three primary instantiations of the incestuous family apparatus. Taken together, Barnes's works present a scale of viability for the incestuous relationship. Through engagement with Barnes's work and her implicit theory of incest, this project seeks to investigate and challenge normative categories of viable relationships that currently do not (nor did they in Barnes's time) include incestuous relationships. Barnes's work suggests that it is the individual instantiations of the incestuous family apparatus that make incest a viable mode of being and relating, just as it is the individual instantiations of the non-incestuous family apparatus that allow the normative definition of the family to thrive. Barnes presents familial relationships as not taboo, and suggests that incest is not necessarily concomitant with trauma, fantasy, or abuse. Through analysis of Barnes's work, this thesis sheds new light on a central dimension of Barnes's work. In addition, through Barnes's conceptions and presentations of incest, the project seeks to open up new understandings of incestuous relationships and their implications, as well as, more generally, consider ways to expand the range of ways-of-life - what I call livelihoods - accepted as valid and valuable (viable) by North American and European culture.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 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".