A Rose is a Rose is a Hero is a Horse: Naming and Referentiality in the Poetry of Robert Kroetsch and Gertrude Stein
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The contemporary Canadian poet Robert Kroetsch claims Gertrude Stein as an important influence on his work. On the surface, there are indeed many similarities between the poetics of Kroetsch and that of Stein. Separated by one generation and one epoch of literary history – from Stein’s Modernism to Kroetsch’s avowed Postmodernism – they are nevertheless both avant-garde poets, with an interest in the relationship of signifier to signified and in the problems and joys of representation. However, the poetry of these two writers diverges radically in meaning-making practices and, finally, philosophical foundations. Although Stein and Kroetsch share a fascination with the unstable relationship between signifier and signified, Stein’s approach seems to suggest that the instability was a problem and source of anxiety in her quest to represent reality, even inasmuch as ‘representation’ became ‘creation’, while Kroetsch’s poetry and critical writings express a joy and sense of play produced by his awareness of the gap between signified and signifier. I have reconstructed the metalinguistics of these two avant-garde writers by comparing poems by Kroetsch and Stein at the level of syntax, lexical collocation and coherence, and conception. Their poems share many themes and preoccupations, including conceptions of ‘naming’, the deconstruction of the signifier, and the status of the text. However, differences in technique are the direct reflection of philosophical differences in art movements at opposite ends of the 20th century.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".