Bibliographic record
Abstract
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. …
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.039 | 0.019 |
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".