"Hello, abattoir!": Becoming Through Slaughter in Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on the tradition of both the Bildungsroman and the Kunstlerroman , Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness (2004) presents animal slaughter as the central symbol of adolescent becoming. In her depiction of Happy Family Farms, the local chicken processing plant in East Village, Manitoba, Toews offers a rigorous critique of the ways in which the town resists its own cultural erasure by rebranding itself as a town open for business – in this case, factory farming. Because a career at the abattoir is one of the few vocational opportunities open to young people like conflicted Mennonite teenager Nomi Nickels, Toews builds narrative suspense by alluding to the job awaiting Nomi if she chooses to remain in East Village. True to the dynamic structure of the novel, Nomi defers this decision, thus rejecting the closure of having become for the more episodic process of becoming . In this way, Toews crafts an ironic commentary on the teleology of coming-of-age narratives.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".