Literature and Obstetrics: Reading Maternal Posture in Jacques Ferron's "Little William"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Jacques Ferron’s “Little William” is a story of birth and naming in a remote Quebec coastal community. Obstetrical issues and issues of cultural and political survival come together when a French Canadian doctor finds himself obliged to submit to the authority of a country midwife and deliver a baby in the so-called “English position” (or left lateral maternal posture) hitherto unknown to him. In this reading, elements of comparative obstetrical history are integrated with literary and cultural analysis, to reveal complex cross-cultural tensions, not only between French and English, but between institutional obstetrics and traditional midwifery. At the same time, attention is redirected to the figure of the story’s mother and to the “facelessness” of the birth. Parallels are drawn between Ferron’s text and scientific writing, and literary narrative is seen to mimic and at the same time call into question the narratives of obstetrical history.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".