“A Whole New Take on Indigenous”: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake as Wild Animal Story
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy has met with popular acclaim and generated considerable scholarly interest since the 2003 publication of its first volume, Oryx and Crake. The implicit critique of Western capitalism presented in Atwood’s dystopian vision of a post-democratic, post-national, and post-human future seems to offer a wide appeal, particularly at a time of sustained environmental crisis. Instead of evaluating the merits of Atwood’s critique, however, this paper examines the ways in which the speculative future of Oryx and Crake and the warnings it contains are delimited by a problematic Second World paradigm. More specifically, the novel can be read in terms of the wild animal story, a genre first established in late-nineteenth-century Canada that Atwood herself was instrumental in defining as such in her controversial 1972 study Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. In keeping with the conventions of the wild animal story, boundary crossings in Atwood’s novel engage in indigenizing fantasy. Despite its powerful warning of imminent disaster, Oryx and Crake nevertheless obscures ongoing colonializing acts by privileging a settler subject-position conceived as endangered by the forces of modernity
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".