"One thing can look like another": The Aesthetics and Performance of Trauma in Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees explores Canada’s gothic colonial past as it intersects with the postcolonial present, and it demonstrates that fiction can contribute to how trauma is theorized. Although the novel engages with gothic conventions and tropes, trauma finds its expression through magic realism. Through visual media, music, and performance, the novel offers a series of traumatic memories as always and only representations of the original encounter; as the experience of trauma confronts the limits of both representation and understanding, magic realist techniques represent the trauma as both real and imaginatively constituted. In line with Cathy Caruth’s view of the “bewildering encounter with trauma” as prompting recognition of “the possibility of a history that is no longer straightforwardly referential,” Fall on Your Knees suggests that the performative and aesthetic aspects of traumatic memory open up questions about the reliability of narrative representation.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".