Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on both recent and older debates in and about literary theory, this dissertation considers the relationship between “theory” and “literary texts,” arguing that we can and should learn to read literary texts as themselves a kind of theory. More specifically, I argue that speculative fiction (that is, fantasy and science fiction) makes the theoretical aspects of literature particularly obvious: by virtue of its ability to change or circumvent the “rules of reality” that govern our day-to-day lives and the worlds and conventions of realist fiction, speculative fiction is uniquely positioned to explore theoretical questions and problems, in ways that I argue can inform our non-speculative reading and interpretive practices as literary critics. I bring together contemporary speculative fiction in English and Scottish Gaelic, published between 1976 and 2017, as well as the work of the Spanish philosopher and writer Miguel de Unamuno (1868-1936), whose fiction and theoretical writing foreground many of the questions I am interested in, in order to consider specifically both representations of reading within speculative fiction and real-world reading practices for speculative fiction. This dissertation looks at several core aspects of reading in and through speculative texts: the ontological status of fictional characters and the relations that develop between readers, writers, characters, and fictional worlds during the reading process; what I call “speculative literary criticism,” practices of interpretation that rely on the specifically speculative elements of a text (riddles, spells, prophecies, and the like); and the politics of “escape” and “escapism” in relation to the language of Gaelic science fiction. Interspersed with these critical analyses of speculative fiction are several of my own short stories that explore relevant theoretical questions through the medium of speculative fiction. Ultimately, I argue that speculative fiction both raises and can help answer significant questions about literary interpretation and open new possibilities for the practice of literary criticism.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".