Bibliographic record
Abstract
By the time True Stories (1981), her 9th poem collection, was published, Margaret Atwood had become well known internationally as well as in Canada for both her novels and poems. Bodily Harm, her 5th published novel, was issued in the same year. In that year, Atwood was active socially as a vice-chair of the Writers' Union of Canada and also spoke out as a spokesperson of Amnesty International against the abuse of human rights. The expression Witness is what must used in the title of this paper is quoted from the title poem Notes towards a Poem That Can Never Been Written in Section II of True Stories. Atwood's speakers in this poem collection give various kinds of witness to oppression. In this paper, I focus on the line Witness is what must and discuss what various narrators in the poems report and eventually why they do bear witness. The poems in Section II, titled Notes towards a Poem That Can Never Been Written involve torture and violence in the Caribbean islands where Atwood was going during the 1970s. During those years, Atwood herself collected information about the situations of people in the Caribbean world and felt a need to speak out. The speakers deliver reports on the violence in both political and private situations. Repetitive use of you in the poems forces the reader to participate in the plot, encouraging them to bear witness on behalf of those silenced. However, can witness convey the truth? There is no single truth. In her 4th published novel Life Before Man (1979), Atwood emphasizes there cannot be any single fact through different perspectives of plural narrators. Clearly, in history makes the facts and spreads them as the only truth, suppressing other facts deriving from the powerless. Different perspectives by the people not in power are important to approximate closely to the truth. True Stories utilizes different perspectives that the reader needs in order to comprehend the world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".