Rebuilding fictions: Violence and the aesthetic in Cormac McCarthy, Michael Ondaatje, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critical accounts of postmodern fiction, with its inconclusive plots and fractured psyches, typically hinge on tropes of entropy, decentering, and the evacuation of meaning. Recent philosophical debates about ethics and religion, especially in their uptake by the literary academy as postsecular criticism and the ethical turn, deploy a similar set of concepts to emphasize ontological instability and radical deferral to the future as the basic structure of belief and attempts to behave ethically toward others. Focusing on such questions of belief and ethics, Rebuilding Fictions argues for an alternative understanding of postmodern fiction that hinges on tropes not of disintegration but of reconstruction and reintegration. A major strand of postmodern fiction epitomized by the U.S. and Canadian novelists Cormac McCarthy, Michael Ondaatje, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth obsessively depicts both the violent collapse of lives and societies and the often post-traumatic process of trying to put those lives back together and start over again. Especially in their novels from the early 1990s to the present, McCarthy, Ondaatje, Morrison, and Roth repeatedly describe their characters' lives through metaphors of wounded trees growing back or ruined buildings being rebuilt. Rebuilding Fictions frames this emphasis on reconstruction in the historical period stretching from the tail end of the Cold War through the inter-war 90s to the present global formation of the War on Terror: reconstruction takes center stage in novels concerned with what it means to act in a post-war moment (post-1945, post-1989) or within a war that seems repetitively stuck in previous violence (World War II, the Second Gulf War). Rebuilding Fictions works out the mechanics by which literary characters placed in such violent situations reconstitute their identities, worldviews, and communal ties with others, typically by reading and writing. And these reconstructive acts of reading and writing also rebuild ethical relationships and religious beliefs, portraying belief and ethics not as radically deferred but as simultaneously present and reinventing themselves.
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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 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".