MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W287942433

Heart of a Stranger

2005· article· en· W287942433 on OpenAlex

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.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueARIEL · 2005
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCanadian Identity and History
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMemoirPraiseNarrativeBiographyHistoryLiteratureArt historyClassicsArt
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Margaret Laurence. Heart of a Stranger. Ed. Nora Foster Stovel. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2003. Pp. xxxiii, 236. $29.95 pb. When George Woodcock hailed the publication of Heart of a Stranger in 1976, he pointed out that the essays and memoirs collected in Margaret Laurence's book formed not merely evocative background to her fiction, but also a minimal autobiography of a remarkable author and a remarkable person (2). reissued volume still performs these two basic functions, for it provides both a key to a better understanding of Laurence's novels and short stories, and illuminating complement to her posthumously published Dance on the Earth: A Memoir (1989). Additionally, nowadays the collection is likely to be appraised above all in the light of the increasing amount of critical attention paid to travel narratives, a substantial body of writings long subjected to a three-fold prejudice: literary, political, and disciplinary (Youngs 55). fact that travel writing constitutes a progressively valued literary form, whose creative properties are deemed worthy of praise at last, may explain why the editor of the present volume prefers to emphasize that this book is first and foremost a travelogue. Thus, in her introduction, Nora Foster Stovel considers in detail the two aspects already noted by Woodcock in his laudatory Canadian Literature editorial, but she starts by focusing on Heart of a Stranger at a literal level, as a fascinating chronicle of the authors geographical journeys to various countries. Inspired by the travel books she read during her childhood and adolescence, Margaret Laurence developed her keen interest in other cultures when she moved first to England and then to Africa. This continent was to be her home for seven years and the main source for five of her books: anthology of translations of Somali poems and folk-tales, her first novel, her first volume of short stories, a travel-memoir of her two years in Somaliland, and a study of Nigerian drama and fiction. recent scholarly recognition of Laurence's African writings, after long years of almost exclusive concentration on the Manawaka cycle, will stimulate a thorough revision of this timely new edition of Heart of a Stranger in search of the insights that the author gained through her experiences in Somalia and Ghana. Rereading The Very Best Intentions, Laurence's first-published article, we perceive a heightened awareness of her awkward position as a militant white liberal trying to sympathize with a Ghanaian nationalist on the eve of independence. She was perceptive enough to understand why she encountered enormous difficulties in finding a common ground with him, for their perspectives were intrinsically opposed. Laurence's humorous and authentically humble self-portrayal as a naive foreigner striving to substitute stereotypes for genuine apprehensions on her part and on that of her interlocutor, while exerting herself in order to avoid causing him offence, probably remains as fresh in our post-colonial times as it was when the essay appeared in 1964. Furthermore, this article may help to elucidate certain features of her novel This Side Jordan (1960) and her collection of short stories Tomorrow-Tamer (1963), both set in Ghana just before independence. Humour is the salient feature of Sayonara, Agamemnon, a slight piece about a tour in Greece which meant for Laurence an initiation into the world of tourism (11). But most of the essays are far from being merely anecdotal sketches of her journeys, since they cover a variety of topics and substantiate the author's wide range of interests, including mythology and history. Many of her accounts reveal her as ethically engaged writer and give ample evidence of her deep political concerns for humanity at large, transcending the geographical borders of her own country. …

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.792
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.011
GPT teacher head0.244
Teacher spread0.233 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it