Volkswagen Blues Twenty-Five Years Later: Revisiting Poulin’s Pitsémine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Jacques Poulin’s popular and award-winning novel Volkswagen Blues celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2009, and it holds a prominent position in Quebecois and Canadian literary histories. The novel attempts to break down the master narrative of a superior “pure laine” culture through the quests of its two main characters – a writer’s-blocked Quebecois, Jack, and Pitsemine, who hopes to reconcile the two halves of her mixed identity (Quebecoise and Innu). In order to promote a move towards a more tolerant and diverse society, Poulin embraces the hybrid as an alternative. Poulin’s use of the mixed-blood or Metis identity as a vehicle to promote hybridity, while it appears to promote inclusion, arguably leads to erasure of Indigenous cultures and nations. By portraying Native culture as dying or dead and presenting hybrid culture as the only viable solution for Quebec, Poulin threatens to eliminate the Native, replacing it instead with a new, generic hybrid.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".