Global, national and regional intersections in the fiction of Douglas Coupland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the global, local and regional intersections of Douglas Coupland’s Vancouver fiction. Observing that Coupland’s generation came of age during the most recent and most intense phase of globalisation, I postulate that Coupland’s work shows how globalisation has affected his and subsequent generations by radically altering relationships to place including nation and region. I also argue that the rapidity of changes in the era of globalisation has led to anxiety about apocalypse and ambiguity about the idea of home. I examine evidence of this in Coupland’s Vancouver situated texts, Life After God, Girlfriend in a Coma, and Hey Nostradamus. \n\nChapter One begins with a survey of recent writing on globalisation, arguing that an interdisciplinary approach is necessary to fully understand the ramifications of globalisation, its relationship to culture, and its effects on nation and region. I then move towards a focus on literary criticism and the changing and overlapping connotations of region and nation in literary studies. Chapter Two investigates Coupand’s visions of apocalypse, arguing that they are a product of geographical and generational anxiety. Geographical anxiety is illustrated by Coupland’s literary mapping of the Northwest Coast and Vancouver as an apocalyptic space, and the generational anxiety stems from an upbringing in the Cold War and the instability brought by globalisation. I suggest that Coupland ultimately rejects the notion of the apocalypse in favour of prophetic eschatology which demands the revision of the existing world. \n\nChapter Three looks at ideas of home, how these are changing in the globalised world and how Coupland’s work draws attention to this. I argue that although he advocates alternative, non-place based conceptions of home, he also he simultaneously reinforces the idea that home is attached to place by mapping Vancouver and the Vancouver suburb in which he was raised in much of his fiction. I conclude that he emphasises family and community throughout his texts and is consistently forward looking, imagining and envisioning the future locally and globally.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".