London literarisch: Stadtentwürfe im zeitgenössischen englischen Roman, 1990-2000
Bibliographic record
Abstract
"The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture." This is how Jonathan Raban describes the relationship between textual and material city in his influential monograph Soft City (1974). The tension between fiction and fact and their interplay provide the starting point for my investigation.The aim of this dissertation is a systematic study of the fictional representation of London in selected novels from 1990 to 2000 thus contributing to the research on contemporary English literature. Considering the material city and possibilities of its imaginary construction as well as the city as sociocultural phenomenon, this thesis combines two theoretical discourses which have been examined separately so far: namely the postmodern, which focusses on aspects of reading the city, hence foregrounding its textuality, whereas the postcolonial deals with the city as multicultural place and its capacity to accommodate a variety of cultural and ethnic identities. Here, the concept of Black British Writing plays an important role. The dissertation provides a close reading of City of the Mind (1991) by Penelope Lively, Bleeding London (1997) by Geoff Nicholson, Atima Srivastava's Transmission (1992), Diran Adebayo's Some Kind of Black (1996) as well as My Once Upon a Time (2000) and Zadie Smith's award-winning debut novel White Teeth (2000).Generating the categories "Topographical and sociocultural London" and "Symbolic London" from the texts, this study allows for a highly differentiated analysis of how London is constructed in the novels in terms of spatial and social sections, their changes, developments, and, ultimately, their function and the symbolic meaning of the city. This approach renders it possible to determine the texts' specifics on the basis of fixed parameters and to compare them to spatial and sociocultural facts concerning the 'real' city thus illustrating and interpreting aesthetic transformations. Moreover, the consideration of sociological and demographical material extends the focus of this dissertation to a cultural studies perspective.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.003 |
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".