'...beyond the invisible barrier at Portage and Main': Liminality in John Marlyn’s Under the Ribs of Death
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sandor Hunyadi grows up in the working-class community of Winnipeg’s North End. As the teenage son of immigrants, he is faced with poverty at home and prejudice at school. Feeling estranged from his Hungarian parents and excluded from Anglo-Canadian society, he is set on gaining wealth and recognition. In order to become a successful businessman he adopts an English name, takes commercial courses at night school and starts working as assistant manager in a real-estate office. Although his career takes him to “the very threshold of everything he had hoped to achieve”, Alex Hunter loses employment and prosperity when the Great Depression hits Canada. Liminality is a central motif of John Marlyn’s Under the Ribs of Death. First published in 1957, this two-part novel focuses on the development of Sandor Hunyadi/Alex Hunter in pre-World War I and interwar Winnipeg. The young foreign-born Canadian is portrayed in a variety of liminal spaces, ranging from the meeting place of the neighborhood gang to the local railroad station where immigrants arrive. More significantly, he experiences change and transition at multiple levels, passing from boyhood to adulthood, crossing from minority to mainstream culture, and moving from his family home in the slums to the business world on Main Street. In short, his life is marked by permanent liminality.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".