The Author and the Magi: Magic in the Ancient Novel and its Implications for Readership
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What argues most strongly for the recognition of the ancient "novel" as part of the novel genre in its proper sense is its familiarity.These texts, picaresque, romantic, concise and designed to thrill, offer no generic convention unfamiliar to us from the modern novels of western Europe-the improbable escape, the enduring love, the cunning and double-crossing pirate, are all commonplaces in long prose fiction.In recent centuries an artificial distinction has been made in prose fiction between "literature," that is, The Canon of influential novels as delineated by various critics, and "not literature"-drugstore paperbacks, erotica, science fiction (a category with internal categorical anxieties of its own), and other ne'er-do-wells of the print trade.By comparison of the aforementioned narrative commonplaces, the ancient novels are seen as similar to the latter set of modern works, a probable source of the "fastidious distaste" that Margaret Anne Doody identifies in her study of the history of the novel genre, The True Story of the Novel (Doody 9).But the ancient novels' relative simplicity and flatness of character are reflective, in my opinion, of the state of psychology of the time rather than any primitivity of narrative sophistication.Doody has expressed Mikhail Bakhtin's dismissal of the ancient novel as rudimentary with this summation: "Ancient novels have nothing important to say about the individual" (2).And yet, the "private individual" (Bakhtin 110) in the sense Bakhtin seems to mean is a figure whose genesis came in the Enlightenment and whose development in literature appeared at the same time, in such books as Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders.It is spurious, indeed a temporal "chauvinism," as Doody puts it, to judge the quality
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".