New Ecologies of the Real: Nonsimultaneity and Canadian Literature(s)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay draws attention to variations in the use of formal textual strategies that sometimes have been overlooked in the productive but potentially homogenizing shift from Canadian literature to Canadian literatures. A mere insistence on pluralization can run the risk of masking differences that include specific forms of “nonsimultaneity” or ungleichzeitigkeit (Ernst Bloch). Such differing relations to time—or heterochronicities— imply related, varying views of space, point to different functionalities of formal modes and genres, and influence how texts relate to audiences and intervene in the public sphere. I argue that the deployment of formal elements is often contingent on social dimensions and cultural specificity, and thus on contextual factors whose consideration was seen as detrimental to the discussion of Canadian literature in Frank Davey’s “Surviving the Paraphrase.” Focusing on examples drawn from black Canadian cultural expression, I examine contextually motivated temporalities in works by George Elliott Clarke, Marie-Celie Agnant, Sylvia Hamilton, Camille Turner, and Wayde Compton. By using distinct strategies of re-temporalization and re-spatialization, these writers and artists work towards the “not-yet” of a differently conceived future and exert civic agency with the help of formal choices in their art.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.052 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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 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".