Travels through This Place: Joan Barfoot's<i>Gaining Ground</i>as Quest Narrative
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores, from a feminist perspective, a critically neglected work of Canadian fiction, drawing from the disciplines of narratology and literary linguistics in its argument. It initially considers some of the reasons why Joan Barfoot's Gaining Ground, published in 1978, has attracted scant academic attention, suggesting that it suffered from the feminist backlash prevalent in the late seventies in North America. In its depiction of a disassociated, perhaps even rebarbative female narrator, in a narrative described in one contemporary review as "an expression of selfishness in women's libration," the novel incurred, and still incurs, antipathetic responses, which, the article, argues, have tended to deflect from its undoubted stylistic merits. The author of the article maintains that Gaining Ground deserves much greater critical acclaim. The article identifies and analyzes the many instances of subversion in the narrative, demonstrating how narrative devices such as temporal dislocation, hypodiegesis, recurrent imagery, and lexical cohesion serve to characterize the narrator's journey as a courageous quest after self-actualization. The article concludes with the assertion that Barfoot's novel is best regarded as a feminist quest, much like Margaret Atwood's canonical novel, Surfacing.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".