Alzheimer’s, Ambiguity, and Irony: Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came over the Mountain” and Sarah Polley’s Away from Her
Bibliographic record
Abstract
By offering an extended close reading of Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came over the Mountain” and Sarah Polley’s filmic adaption of this story, Away from Her, this paper traces the process whereby Munro’s and Polley’s narratives expand our understanding of the Lockean view of identity as “consciousness inhabiting a body.” More precisely, Munro’s and Polley’s texts shed light on Locke’s lesser known insights into the fraught relationship between memory and passions. By underscoring both the passionate, affective and embodied facets of remembering and forgetting and the intersubjective basis of meaning and identity, Munro’s and Polley’s works challenge Locke’s basic conception of an autonomous, rational self. In the process, both the story and the film deconstruct biomedical, mechanistic models by exposing the ironic instabilities and ambiguities associated with the experience of late-onset cognitive decline.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".