Diasporic Narcissism: De-sublimating Scotland in Alice Munro and Alistair MacLeod
Bibliographic record
Abstract
First paragraph: In the only sustained exploration of Scottish-Canadian literary relations, Elizabeth Waterston writes: The situation in each nation and in its literature seems to clarify that of the other. Here are two northern nations, ironic and sentimental, each quietly resentful of the stronger, more affluent neighbour lying south of the national border, indifferent to or unaware of the impact of its culture on others. Here are two sets of writers whose literary strategies and structures have been sharpened and maybe warped by northernness, the doubleness, the angular spareness of their heritage, and the pressure of alien alternatives. (Waterston 2001, 8-9) Freud observed that nations with uncertain claims to separateness are liable to the "narcissism of small differences" (2002, 50-51). Here, Waterston hints that Scotland and Canada's small differences are largely the same, and gradually reconstitutes them as traces of filial provenance passed from parent to child. There is a continual slippage in Rapt in Plaid between historically contingent literary tastes and forms (e.g. John Buchan's discovery of an "already strong attachment to his kind of writing" in Canada (9)) and totalised national mentalities ("ironic and sentimental") which betoken a linear relation of heritage transfer, rather than a common positionality vis-àvis "alien alternatives". The shared cultural condition begins as an exogenous parallel -- tensions with the encroaching southern neighbour -- but is briskly smuggled under the mail-order kilt, endogenised and essentialised. "When Scots immigrants came to Canada in the early nineteenth century, they brought Robert Burns's values with them, packed into their psyches, just as the volume of his poems was packed into their brass-bound sea trunks" (9). Affinities of circumstance have quickly become organic folkways, legible as family resemblances. The north-south "small differences" of these two countries are re-coded and narrativised within the east-west dynamic of diasporic transmission, estrangement and yearning.
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 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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".