Bibliographic record
Abstract
Marlene Goldman. DisPossession: Haunting in Fiction. Montreal: McGill-Queen's up, 2012. 370 pp. $95.00 cloth. The explosion of interest in field of study that brings together Gothic, uncanny, haunted, and haunting, together with postcolonial reassessive method, suggests that perhaps ghosts and monsters that haunt nation/ subject (from without and within) are finally being heard. Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte A desire to listen to spectres that haunt recent literature underlies Marlene Goldman's latest monograph, Dispossession: Haunting in Fiction. As she proposes in her introduction, despite or perhaps because of Birney's suggestion that Canadians are haunted by lack of spectres, contemporary English-Canadian authors are obsessed with ghosts and (3). Dispossession explores in depth how seven of these contemporary authors deploy tropes of haunting and possession in one or, in case of Dionne Brand, several of their works. In addition to Brand's corpus, Goldman examines Sheila Watson's The Double Hook, Gail Anderson-Dargatz's The Cure for Death by Lightning, John Steffler's The Afterlife of George Cartwright, Jane Urquhart's Away, Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, and Thomas King's Truth and Bright Water. Mobilizing literature's political capacities, Dispossession links haunting in these texts to praxis of engagement with fraught and troubling strains of Canada's social history and national imaginary. Goldman outlines this praxis most explicitly in her conclusion, Toward an Ethics of Haunting, where she posits that Canadian literature that invokes haunting and possession is 'good for us' precisely because it emphasizes elided histories and resistance of (306). In Canada, she argues, living with ghosts means recognizing without mastering opaque, unsettled, and unsettling parts of the complex territory of (320). In keeping with methodological bent of her previous books, Goldman draws from range of theoretical frameworks, including postcolonial, poststructuralist, feminist, queer, and psychoanalytical, to tease out varied contexts and implications of each literary work. She also attends closely to cultural and historical specificities of each text and underscores influence not just of Gothic but also of magic realism, Celticism, and Aboriginal and Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions on individual workings of haunting and possession. The result is collection of close readings that extend and supplement earlier studies such as Jonathan Kertzer's Worrying Nation: Imagining National Literature in English Canada and Justin Edwards's Gothic Canada: Reading Spectre of National Literature by opening up particularities of our cultural in its various forms. Goldman unpacks tropes of haunting and possession not only along lines of nationhood and citizenship but also of a broader tendency on part of western cultures to suppress one side of many perceived dualities, including male/female, civilization/ savagery, and reason/passion (6). As well, she underscores challenges that these fictional spectres pose to the settler's spatial and ontological paradigm of self-possessed, autonomous man (or, as she demonstrates with particular force in her readings of Alias Grace, Away, and, in Dionne Brand's work, woman) (244). Although they do not conform solely to Gothic modes, haunted narratives that Goldman explores in her study all partake of Gothic's association of ghostly form with other that cannot be assimilated. Following Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte, among others, Goldman also underscores connection between haunting in literature and the 'unhomely' or 'spectral' legacies of imperialism and globalization (Sugars and Turcotte vii). A constant throughout her book is (elusive) idea of home: One reason for popularity of tales of haunting and possession, she suggests, may be fact that movement from domestic sphere into global marketplace, instigated by global capitalism and diasporic upheavals, has meant that home as constant has become less of given, as more and more people are unhomed--often forced to exist in kind of liminal space traditionally associated with ghost (14). …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".