Comics in The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature: is sequential art the future of the Canadian literary canon?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper, both a testimony and reflection about the author’s experience as contributor of the “comic art and bande dessinée” chapter of the Cambridge History of Canadian Literature (Cambridge UP, 2009) discusses the challenge of summarizing the essentials of Canadian comics history since the mid-19th century in 6,000 words and proceeds to answer the following question: why does Canada’s literary canon integrate comics whereas its French and American counterparts, for instance, have so far failed to do so? This phenomenon appears closely linked to one aspect of Canada’s postcolonial specificity—the country’s intellectual elites’ comprehensive outlook on cultural production. This “limited elitism” approach actually became a hallmark of Canadian cultural policy as of the 1950s following the Massey Commission’s introduction of the “Canadian content” concept and the subsequent development of an open-ended conception of national culture. Canada’s cultural context provides a very interesting example of the ongoing legitimization of comics in the 21st century but also, more broadly, of the dynamics that permanently rewrite a national literary canon.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".