The Language of Faith and American Exceptionalism in The Lure of the Labrador Wild
Bibliographic record
Abstract
DILLON WALLACE’S The Lure of the Labrador Wild chronicles the disastrous 1903 trip into the Labrador wilderness that Wallace took with fellow American Leonidas Hubbard and Canadian Scots-Cree guide George Elson. Led by Hubbard, the group attempted to travel from North West River to Ungava Bay with the aims of mapping both the Naskaupi River and the George River, documenting the caribou migration, and making contact with the remote band of Innu known as the Naskapi (Buchanan et al. 8-9; Grace, “A Woman’s Way” xxi). After the group confused the Susan River for the Naskaupi River, these goals gave way to a grim fight for survival that claimed Hubbard’s life. However, Dillon Wallace’s stirring depiction of the trip two years later in The Lure of the Labrador Wild spurred a widespread fascination with the journey that continues to this day. In light of recent publications which delve further into the circumstances and theoretical significance of the book, it is important to explore Wallace’s use of a specifically American mythology which, despite being relatively ignored by critics, has resonated with readers for over a century. Despite the large critical reception to The Lure of the Labrador Wild, Wallace’s narrative has been widely interpreted as an adventure tale devoid of any cultural frame of reference. However, his use of the rhetoric of faith promotes the virtue of American culture through the discourse of American exceptionalism. American exceptionalism refers to the myth of America as a nation endowed with spiritual power and responsibility. This longstanding belief in America as a distinct and morally superior nation guided by spiritual duty (Byers 46; Madsen 1) is evident in
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".