Louise Forsyth, Ed. Anthology of Quebec Women's Plays in English Translation Volume 1(1966-1986)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
LOUISE FORSYTH, ed. Anthology of Quebec Women's Plays in English Translation Volume 1(1966-1986). Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2006. 570pp. Anthology of Quebec Women's Plays in English Translation Volume II (1987-2003)' Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2008. 380pp. The first two volumes of Louise Forsyth's Anthology of Quebec Women's Plays in English Translation represent a colossal accomplishment. Published by Playwrights Canada Press, this collection gathers together an important body of work, including several plays which have left their mark on the history of Quebec theatre, while studying it from a new perspective. How has women's theatre unfolded since the time it propelled its way onto Quebec stages with the audacious subject matter and aesthetic research it then exhibited up until recent years when it undertook to explore humanity's search for meaning? One of the major strengths of this work is the excellent introduction to both volumes wherein Forsyth extracts the main ideas from the selected plays and indicates where they meet, support one another, and create specific themes in a chorus of women's voices that has resonated for some forty years on Quebec stages. And she allows us to hear these voices in English, thus amplifying their resonance and extending their impact beyond the language of their original incarnation. Beside the introductions, in which Forsyth presents a sociocultural contextualization of Quebec during the period under study and points out the distinguishing features of theatre productions specific to women, she also provides an introduction to each play, including a detailed analysis of the issues specific to each one, followed by information about the author, a list of selected works and bibliographical suggestions. Thus, with each play, we receive a veritable wealth of information on the author and her work. Each volume finishes with a substantial bibliography and a biographical note on the translators and the editor. Amongst the eighteen plays contained in the two volumes, Forsyth has translated two of them herself. For several of the plays, it is the first time they have been published in English. The first volume contains the following eleven plays, produced between 1966 and 1986: The Savage Season (Le Temps sauvage) by Anne Hebert, translated by Pamela Grant and Gregory Reid; Playing Double (Double jeu) by Francoise Loranger, translated by Louise H. Forsyth; Mine Sincerely (Bien a moi) by Marie Savard, translated by Louise H. Forsyth; Evangeline the Second (Evangeline deusse) by New Brunswick Acadian author Antonine Maillet, translated by Luis de Cespedes; The Ocean (L'Ocean) by Marie-Claire Blais, translated by Ray Chamberlain; A Clash of Symbols (La Nef des sorcieres) by Marthe Blackburn, Marie-Claire Blais, Nicole Brossard, Odette Gagnon, Luce Guilbeault, Pol Pelletier, France Theoret, translated by Linda Gaboriau; The Fairies Are Thirsty (Les Fees ont soif) by Denise Boucher, translated by Alan Brown; Mommy (Moman) by Louisette Dussault, translated by Linda Gaboriau; The Edge of Earth Is Too Near, Violette Leduc (La Terre est trop courte, Violette Leduc) by Jovette Marchessault, translated by Susanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood; Night (L'Homme gris) by Marie Laberge, translated by Rina Fraticelli; and Marie-Antoine, Opus One (Marie-Antoine, Opus 1) by Lise Vaillancourt, translated by Jill MacDougall. According to Forsyth, these plays, created while developing a feminist consciousness and discourse, attempt to present a dialogue for which there was as yet no model. Thus, they largely resorted to the monologue because communication fails to occur between the interlocutors. Rejecting the status quo, the creators explore new aesthetics that highlight performance and experimentation. The favoured themes are often those where patriarchal influence is felt the most strongly, ie. maternity, mother-daughter relationships and women's sexuality. …
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.071 | 0.019 |
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".