'Let us find our serious heads': Placing the Manifesto in Canadian Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The year 2009 marked the centenary of the publication of ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ on the front page of Le Figaro. As Martin Puchner argues in Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (2005):‘Futurism taught everyone how the manifesto worked’. The manifesto was indispensible to modernist and avant-garde movements in the twentieth century, from dada and surrealism to Canada’s own neoism. But the literary-artistic manifesto did not originate with futurism, and its use has not been limited to the avant-garde. In Canada, for example, manifestos have served both to mark turning points and to generate ruptures in the longstanding debate on the value and viability of a national literature. In this paper I will examine the changing role the manifesto played in Canadian literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the Second World War. Between these dates we can trace the genre’s early development in the struggle for national identity to its more precisely literary use as a tool of modernist provocation. The study will draw upon important literary magazines of the period, from Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s New Era (1857-58) to “little magazines” like Alan Crawley’s Contemporary Verse (1940-52). The manifestos appear not only as “manifestos,” but also as editorials, prospectuses, prefaces, speeches, letters, essays, and poems. What unites them is a tone of urgency, a promise of salvation, and the struggle to break a path out of the current crisis.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.062 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".