Sublime Transactions. The Gestures of Poetry and Criticism with Anne Carson, the Scholar-Poet
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 20th century, as well as the 21st, is ripe with hermeneutic anxiety concerning the survival of the object of interpretation and the right way to study literature. In this thesis, the Canadian scholar-poet Anne Carson is studied as a framework to an understanding of how poetry and literary criticism – the event of hermeneutics – co-occur, converge, and diverge. Specifically, it studies Carson’s poetic and essayistic work, with specific focus on Plainwater (1995), Economy of the Unlost (1999), The Beauty of the Husband (2002) and Decreation (2005). Split in three sections, titled ”Survival”, ”Resurrection”, and ”Vitality” it suggests a chronology of the poem and the interpreter which is based not on temporal trajectory but on a continuum of the sublime wherein affect is key. Criticism, it concludes, is inherently poetic and affective while poetry has the capacity of establishing and transferring knowledge. Under ”Survival”, this thesis establishes the affective nature of both poetry and literary criticism with the help of Julia Kristeva’s Intertextuality, Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicism, and Brian Massumi’s theories on play. ”Resurrection” performs close readings of several of Carson’s texts in order to investigate the complex relationship between interpreter and object of interpretation, revealing it to be ripe with anxiety, impossibly subjective, and acutely necessary. Further, it discusses problems of truth and knowledge, as well as the nature of the connection between words and the thing in itself. Finally, ”Vitality” offers a reading of the continuum of poetry and criticism as centered on vitality, as well as reads it according to the rules of a gift-economy in which the deadly stroke of an interpretive dagger is transformed into a mutual cut resulting in profit.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| 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 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".