Sorry to veer slightly off-topic, but can anyone familiar with academia explain why such a literary exercise gets published on Arxiv as a research paper? What is scientific or research-driven about it? How is this different from a long-form opinion or literary essay except for the fact that it's written with a paper-like style and voice? I'm baffled. Is this just because humanities professors need to show they're published as well and they need to get a score for tenure, or something like that?