Fictional Fossils: Life and Death Writing in Carol Shields's The Stone Diaries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
[T]he moment of death occurs while we're still alive. Life marches right up to the wall of that final darkness, one extreme state of being butting against the other. Not even a breath separates them. Not even a blink of the eye. 1 C. Shields, The Stone Diaries (Toronto, 1993), p. 342. Further references will be given in the text, as page number. R egarding life and death as ultimate opposites, as two irreconcilable extremes, is a “distortion” 2 challenged by texts, and in particular by life writing. Jeremy Tambling calls all writing “potentially posthumous since it cannot have a punctual relation to a life of writing”. 3 Michel Foucault, too, in his essay “What Is an Author?”, emphasises writing's relationship to death, which he sees as twofold: on the one hand narrativity has always been “intended to perpetuate the immortality of the hero”; on the other hand, it is “designed to ward off death”. 4 In Ivan Callus' words, “to memorialise a life in writing […] is to play with death's deferral”: 5 the text assumes eternal life in the place of the protagonist or writer, and thus allows her or him to live on in their stories. (Auto)biography as a genre thus “challenges a life–death distinction” 6 by softening the delimitations between the two, breaking down the seeming opposition between life and death. Life writing preserves aspects of past lives that would otherwise dissolve without trace, but, in the act of preservation, it destroys the very features which make “life” into the activity of living 7 – so as text it constitutes a contradiction in terms: it extracts life from life in order to conserve it. This is the reason why “the language of monuments [and] epitaphs […] pervades biographical and autobiographical discourse and testifies to the tensions between a posthumous memorialisation of a life and the attempt to grasp the ‘life’ as it was lived.” 8 Laura Marcus quotes W. H. Epstein, who asserts that the “cultural function of biography” is to “turn life into text and text back into life”. 9 I. Callus, “Comparatism and (Auto)thanatography: Death and Mourning in Blanchot, Derrida, and Tim Parks”, in: Autobiografictions: Comparative Essays , ed. L. Boldrini & P. Davies, Comparative Critical Studies Vol. I, No. 3 (2004), p. 337. J. Tambling, Becoming Posthumous: Life and Death in Literary and Cultural Studies (Edinburgh, 2001), p. 8. M. Foucault, “What Is an Author?”, in: The Foucault Reader , ed. P. Rabinov (London, 1984), p. 102. Callus, p. 337. Tambling, p. 7. L. Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourse: Criticism, Theory, Practice (Manchester & New York, 1994), p. 100. Marcus, pp. 27ff. Marcus, quoting from W. H. Epstein, Recognizing Biography (Philadelphia, 1987), pp. 27ff.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".