Neither Chuckwagons, nor Saskatoons, and a Missing Malboro Man: Postcolonialism, Regionalism and the Ineffable Canadian West
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contemporary transnational and transcontinental trends of theory enable a mandatory analysis of how region and regionalism have been fundamental in the solidification of the Canadian national ethos, making locality and globality go hand in hand. Negotiating the meaning of regional identities is therefore a consequence of the processes of globalisation, which have been affecting how we (de)construct the nation. This paper addresses how a vested representation in fiction from the Canadian west and the prairies helped keep at bay the spectrum of fragmentation that threatened the hermetic body of a national literature and culture. Whereas traditional patterns of history and fiction have constructed the west under a recurrent attention to ossified issues of landscape, the west and the plains were more recently conceptualized in attention to a different tackling of time / space: one that unified the former prairies and the west in just one single experience. Anticipating much of the theoretical approach to the global through locality launched in the early 21st century, while also being inheritors of previous theoretical and fictional attempts at renewing regional myths, Guy Vanderhaege’s The Englishman’s Boy (1996) and Thomas Wharton’s Icefields (1997) make the structuring potential of their times and spaces lose their hegemony, thus favouring the rooting of postmodern myths and ineffability to unmark the borders of region, and destabilize those of the national discourse.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".