Aural Readings: Performative Monologues as Oppositional Narratives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My dissertation aims to classify and elucidate a group of unembedded monologues in prose whose narrative voice adopts a spoken or pseudo-spoken mode. In each of the works I study—Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable (1953), António Lobo Antunes’s The Land at the End of the World (1979), Thomas Bernhard’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew (1982) and Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet (1999)—a first-person narrator adopts a mode of speech/narration that is stylistically crafted to simulate differing degrees of spoken discourse. I look to speech-act theory and a variety of narratological concepts to show how the unembedded monologue form manifests a performative function. In this vein, I show that the unframed/unembedded aspect of these monologues is performative in its omission of a descriptive (constative), third-person framework that might suggest a narrative situation in readers’ imaginations. In the last two chapters, I also examine how this performative function is present in the narrators’ tendency to address a fictional listener or group of listeners. In addition, the narrators of these texts all occupy their respective sociopolitical spheres as outsiders or subjects of alterity and position themselves in opposition to cultural and political institutions, adopting critical/nonconformist attitudes towards power structures. I am interested in showing how performative language becomes a tool for endowing these works, and their narrators, with a political edge and a sense of agency; my selection of texts by post-WWII authors, stemming from vastly different literary traditions, aims to explore the performative monologue’s genesis and stages of development. The scope of primary texts establishes a traceable chronology and a cohesive means of grouping together previously isolated examples of this unorthodox narrative mode.
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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 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".