‘It’s only by our lack of ghosts we’re haunted’: Margaret Laurence and the Spectral Process
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper takes as its starting point Derrida’s notion of spectrality, which ‘is at work everywhere’, and uses this theoretical concept to advance a new reading of The Diviners itself, one which sees it as a ghostlike manifestation of the other.The Diviners not only develops its own detailed blueprint of personal hauntings, but is also a broad philosophical meditation on the entire spectral process associated with the Canadian sensation of cultural unease. As part of this overview, Laurence devotes close attention to the question of literary hauntology, displaying considerable ambivalence towards it. I intend to track through these references and look at the issues—the prospect of losing our self and being taken by another, unfamiliar self, literary phantoms which haunt the Canadian imagination etc.— which they raise.But my central purpose will be to re-read the spectral condition of water on the base of Bachelard’s essay L’eau et les rêves. I will reflect on the importance of liquid images which represent the inner world of Canadian dreams, the socio-cultural spectres that return in a sort of a ghostly act of disfiguration with important consequences for the phantasmatic condition of Canada, in which representation is fragmented.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".