Mavis Gallant’s short fiction : history and memory in the light of imagination
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since 1944, Mavis Gallant has published over one hundred short stories. Her position as Canada's foremost expatriate writer is subsumed in her importance as a major short story writer of the postwar era: I claim that her stories enact the distortions of history and memory caused by the social, cultural, and political upheavals of the second world war. Her stories depart from their realist ground to register impressionistically these fissures in time; style and structure teach readers to discern Gallant's theme in the forms of characters' returns to and evasions of the past. As Gallant traces these returns to moments in memory and history, her fiction modulates between apparent documentary realism and transparent impressionism, between scrupulously accurate representation of a historical world and reflexive commentary on memory's processes of invention. The structure of Gallant's fiction formulates characters' returns to missed moments of insight, returns which imply time's fractured progress in their circular eddies between present and past. Studying Gallant's fiction chronologically, I trace in Chapters One through Five the articulation of a broken dialogue between history and memory which begins with characters fleeing from history's reports into memory's fictions. This dialogue develops as postwar history swamps memory, stranding individuals in an attenuated present tense, and it culminates in characters' realization of history's moment as memory's home. In Chapter Five, I examine how these dialogues between memory and history resolve themselves in Gallant's Linnet Muir stories. I show how these lines of development underscore transformations in narrative structure, in point of view, treatment of time, and creation of character, and how the stories' settings evoke an opposition between North American and European visions of history. In Chapter Six, these analyses lead to a concluding study of imagination in Gallant's stories as a light which illuminates the convergence of history with memory, enabling characters to imagine a homecoming in time. Gallant's stories invite readers to consider the ways in which memory's objective portraits and subjective inventions develop into comments on the writer's art of calling the past into being.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".