Dissolving Identities: The Representation of Alzheimer's in Marie Laberge's <i>Oublier</i> (1987), Robert Gravel's <i>Il n'y a plus rien</i> (1992) and Michel Tremblay's <i>L'Impératif présent</i> (2003)
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Of all the degenerative diseases, Alzheimer's has a particular grip on the public interest and the collective imagination of the ageing populations of Western societies. In Québec the number of people affected currently stands at some 20,000, with a quarter of a million sufferers predicted in twenty years’ time. The failure of memory, the loss of social connection, the disappearance of self- and social awareness and the collapse of identity, all of them outrunning other bodily failures, are disturbing and harrowing features of the illness for sufferers themselves in the first instance, and increasingly, as degeneration runs its unstoppable course, for those around them. At the same time, the physiological particularities of the disease link into broader philosophical, psychological and social questions about the role of the memory in the constituting of individual and social identity, and about the conflicting pressures of autonomy and dependence in the field of personal and social interaction. These questions have always greatly interested creative writers, and the intensity of their refraction through the lens of Alzheimer's thus has a wide-ranging general relevance as well as being peculiarly topical. Representation of the illness on stage to a theatre audience poses however ethical and artistic challenges that substantially exceed the private, intimate modes of the novel and poetry. Some of the different ways in which playwrights in Québec have responded to these challenges, and their varying emphases on the complex impacts of the illness are examined here through a comparative and contrastive analysis of Marie Laberge's Oublier (1987), Robert Gravel's Il n'y a plus rien (1992) and Michel Tremblay's L'Impératif présent (2003).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it