Canadian cultural identity, disillusionment, and isolation in contemporary realistic Canadian young adult fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study explores Canadian cultural identity in a selection of contemporary realistic dark-themed Canadian Young Adult (YA) fiction: The Lottery by Beth Goobie, The Space Between by Don Aker, The Beckoners by Carrie Mac, and Swimming in the Monsoon Sea by Shyam Selvadurai. Using close reading, these adolescent novels are analyzed for the “bleak” themes of disillusionment and isolation. The themes are compared to corresponding trends in American YA literature, including self-reflection, ambiguous endings, the role of violence, absent parents, and the forms of the socially and psychologically abject characters. The novels are then analyzed using Canadian critical lenses adapted from John Ralston Saul’s theory of false myths and Daniel Coleman’s theory of wry civility. The critical lenses are also linked to Dennis Lee’s theory of inauthenticity and authenticity in Canadian culture and Northrop Frye’s definitions of unity and uniformity. The analysis concludes that the themes of isolation and disillusionment reflect deep engagement with authentic Canadian cultural theories.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".