The Québecois Connection: The French-Canadian Diaspora in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Jack Kerouac. The name alone is enough to conjure up images of young Americans dropping out of life, taking off down the road with nothing but a beret, bongos and their love for anything ‘cool’. Nearly sixty years after its publishing, On the Road is still seen as the epitome of the American Road story. Or is it? For decades, Americans caught up in the mythology of rugged individualism have headed west in an attempt to discover their place in the world or in search of adventure. For diasporic communities, the process of finding one’s place in the world is especially difficult. Kerouac’s On the Road narrates this process or his journey of personal growth and self-understanding as a member of the French Canadian diaspora in New England. Throughout the majority of the time since its publication in 1957, much of the literary criticism surrounding the text has largely ignored the implications of Kerouac’s identity as a French Canadian born in New England as noted in Todd Tietchen’s recent translation of Kerouac’s journals. I suggest that the influence of Kerouac’s self-identification as a member of the French Canadian diaspora and onsideration of the cultural and historical context of the social milieu of 1940s America complicates our understanding of the text, its metaphors, and themes in new and interesting ways.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| 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".