Bibliographic record
Abstract
Richard Ford’s Canada, published in 2012, seems to have evaded literary studies. This essay—which is an early contribution to the undoubtedly growing range of studies on Canada that will be published in the future—is concerned with how alienation is constructed in the novel. I refer to alienation as a sense of being out of place and becoming estranged, both to others as well as to one's self. The essay focuses mainly but not exclusively on the point of view of the fifteen-year-old protagonist Dell, who is thrown out into a world that has ceased to be adapted to his needs and which seems to threaten his very existence. To speak with Lukács, the protagonist steps out from an unproblematic world into a problematic one and is divided in the process as his ideas are no longer attainable. But this very process of division or alienation also creates room for agency, in the sense of independent action or the will to act independently. In Canada—particularly in the second part of the novel—alienation is constructed in the meetings between Dell and fragmented and morose characters. Dell is required to adapt to these people and the circumstances in which they meet, but in those same processes of adaptation he manages to find small ways out. This makes it possible for Dell to keep himself whole despite his deteriorating circumstances. Equally important for how alienation is constructed in the novel is the meeting between Dell and the landscape of the prairie. While the landscape at first seems to be a source of further alienation, it ultimately proves to be the only place where Dell experience communion.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.054 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".