Speaking in ‘I’: The Interface of Theory and Autobiography in Nicole Brossard’s Life Writing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Nicole Brossard’s ‘fiction theory’, that is, her language‐focused, experimental prose and poetry, has influenced feminist writing in Quebec and English Canada. This article examines Brossard’s inscriptions of radical lesbian subjectivity at the interface of theory and autobiography, focusing on two texts from the mid‐1980s, which can be classified as life writing. By examining The Aerial Letter and Intimate Journal side by side, the author compares different uses and functions of the autobiographical ‘I’ in the service of theory‐making. The Aerial Letter reveals the collective, politicized ‘I’ that assumes an anti‐patriarchal stance working towards establishing a women’s community. On the other hand, Intimate Journal exposes ‘I’ as a fiction of the autobiographical subject displaced between the phenomenological, living body and the published ‘version’ of this body in writing. While remaining loyal to a feminist politics of the personal as political, Brossard’s écriture au féminin explores the subject as fractured and refracted in discourse.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| 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".