Midnight at the Arcanum: a monograph
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Midnight at the Arcanum is a meta-autobiographical monograph that unifies creative and theoretical praxis within a poststructuralist framework. Through its hybrid composition of essay, fiction, poetry, and drama, the work models meta-autobiography as a pedagogic method for critical reflection and social emancipation. It investigates memory, temporality, and the ethics of self-authorship, treating writing itself as dialogic education — a space where meaning arises through reader engagement rather than authorial authority. The front-matter establishes the theoretical and pedagogic foundations of the project. “Reclaiming the Narrative Pedagogy” defines meta-autobiography as a Freirean tool for consciousness-raising and dialogic learning, while “Apologetica de Polyphonia Veritatis” frames truth as polyphonic and relational. Formative vignettes from the author’s childhood and adolescence in 1980s Canada illustrate how linguistic and neurodivergent difference become sources of creative agency and self-definition. The main narrative, told primarily through the voice of Conrad, moves across Burnaby, Vancouver, Montreal, and New Westminster, charting an ethical and intellectual bildung that resists linear autobiography. By weaving the play Empty Rooms and the novella cycle Midnight at the Arcanum into its architecture, the monograph collapses boundaries between author, narrator, and reader. This recursive design embodies poststructural praxis, turning the reader into a participant in the monograph’s pedagogic experiment. The back-matter consolidates the theoretical apparatus of the work. – “Dismantling Lionization in STEM” extends the critique of authorship and authority to science and technology, advocating for trauma-informed, socially just research cultures. – “Call Your Play; Call Your English” translates the metaphor of billiards into a hermeneutic model of interpretive decision-making, illustrating how language is co-authored in dialogue. – “A Poststructuralist Postscript” unifies the theoretical threads, rendering Derridean différance and Ricoeurian narrative identity as pedagogic practice. Together these essays transform the book from memoir into a theoretical instrument: a reproducible framework for educators, researchers, and reflective practitioners exploring meta-autobiographical praxis and narrative pedagogy. The monograph thus functions both as a creative artifact and as a living proof of poststructural ethics in action.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.028 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".