Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation complicates conventional understandings of the emergence of modernism in Canadian cultural production, proposing instead a multiplicity of modernist practices that emerge through direct engagement with leftist politics. By examining various genres—poetry, fiction, theatre, and reportage—“Writing Left” uncovers a set of organizational principles that frame several modes of modernist production within the interwar period. Steeped in the work of recovery, this project examines critical narratives of modernism and analyzes theoretical approaches that inform a revitalized understanding of modernism in Canada. Furthermore, this dissertation offers a series of strategies for reading the ways in which Canadian modernism and political modernity are deeply intertwined. Following an introduction that situates the uneven development of Canadian modernism’s emergence in the larger field of transnational modernism, six theoretically linked case studies show the multiplicity of Canadian modernism’s emergence in relation to leftist political organization. While the first case study discusses the modernist experimentations that came out of the largely antimodernist coterie who produced The Song Fishermen’s Song Sheets (1928–1930), the second case study explores the particularly modernist tensions between representations of art and collective action in the strike novels of Douglas Durkin and Irene Baird. A re-reading of F.R. Scott’s early poetry in the third case study shows the coextensive emergence of a modernist poetics of institutional critique and the development of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, while the fourth case study examines the modernist theatricality of leftist responses to Section 98 of the Criminal Code of Canada. The fifth case study looks to the ways in which the Spanish Civil War prompted modernist developments in the journalism and reportage of Norman Bethune, Hazen Sise, Jean Watts, and Ted Allan. Finally, the sixth case study reads across Charles Yale Harrison’s alternative strategies of anti-war modernism, ending with his characterization of the North American leftist imaginary in his fourth novel, Meet Me on the Barricades (1938). Together, the six case studies question teleological accounts of the development of modernism in English Canadian Literature.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.043 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 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".