Postmemorial Positions: Reading and Writing After theHolocaust in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Anne Michaels’s novel, Fugitive Pieces, has been criticized for its highly poeticized representation of the Holocaust. In this essay, however, Marita Grimwood argues that the novel uses structures of narrative transmission to explore precisely the difficulties of representing history and trauma in language. Grimwood proposes that the representation of three key characters is central to this undertaking. First, Jakob Beer, the child survivor and poet who narrates two thirds of the novel, is positioned as an intergenerational mediator, belonging fully neither to a pre-war nor a postwar generation. Two further characters (Ben, the child of survivors who narrates the end of the novel, and Michaela, Jakob’s second wife) symbolize the figure of the reader after the Holocaust, negotiating a link to the past through their interpretation and witnessing of Jakob’s life. The novel recognizes the problems inherent in communicating meaningful knowledge of past events to those living in the present. Yet, partly through Jakob’s vocation as a poet, it proposes also that poetry is a tool, however imperfect, for the communication of such knowledge.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".