Giving the 21st Century a Try: Canadian and Québécois Women Writers as Essayists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article looks at the use of the essay genre by Canadian and Québécois women writers since 2000, in particular essay writing by authors known primarily for their works of fiction and poetry. For many, the essay form has served as an ideal venue for combining new, innovative, experimental and “alternative” forms of writing with concerns of personal and political struggle for social, cultural, economic, and even psychological recognition and justice. The article begins with a brief overview of aspects of essay writing by Canadian and Québécois women writers at the end of the 20th century before turning to some comparative observations that suggest convergences and differences, as well as continuity and departures in essay writing by Canadian and Québécois women writers since the beginning of the 21st century. Convergences are seen in the combination of personal commentary on topics of social, political, national and global relevance with experimental use of the essay genre. They are seen as well in the continuum of these explorations and practices from the last two decades of the 20th century into the first decade of the 21st century, even as the latter brings about new forms of essay writing in the use of the internet and the blog-essay. Differences between Canadian and Québécois women writers’ practice of the essay may be seen as well, notably in what one literary and critical community reads and knows of the other. This stems in large part from language barriers and limited resources for translation, though these have been overcome in some cases such as the collection of essays by Nicole Brossard in English translation, Fluid Arguments (2005). Whether writing in French or in English, Canadian and Québécois women writers as essayists have produced and continue to produce important work that calls for ongoing critical attention.
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.
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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 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 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".