Bibliographic record
Abstract
'The Bastard Out of St. Louis' is a creative writing M.A. thesis. The text is a prose piece written in the form of a novella, consisting of the first two sections of a proposed longer work. The text is narrated in the first person by the main protagonist, Thomas Bullfinch; an ex-Jesuit priest who has left the Order to seek his fortune and other various misadventures on the plains of Kansas, eventually ending up in the cattle town of Abilene. Through the use of this often myopic and self-obsessed narrative voice, the text addresses the diverse and problematic issues of narrative construction and storytelling. Some of the narrative structures explored by the text include biographical/autobiographical writing, traditional Christian narratives, as well as the genre of the pulp Western novel itself. As the narrative progresses, the integrity and reliability of the narrative voice becomes increasingly questionable, as the narrator is consistently haunted by the need to place his own story and the story of those he meets into a narrative construction that allows events to seem purposeful and comprehensible to him. As a result, the portrayal of events and characters in the text seems to display more of an allegiance to the narrative construction of popular nineteenth century novels than to any notions of objective reality. Fantasy dissolves indistinguishably into reality, and narrative digresses further and further into seemingly irrelevant minutiae, while apparently leaving out entire plot elements pertinent to the 'action' of the story. Eventually, the narrative begins to implode upon itself, fragmenting into multiple points of view, all originating from a single mediating source.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.002 |
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".