Playing <i>l’avocate du diable</i>: The Case against Worlding “French Canadian” Literature from Québec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As a professor of comparative literature in French from Quebec and in English from English-speaking Canada, I am not at all convinced by the project of worlding contemporary Québécois literature. Discussions of this matter are usually found under the umbrella expression “littérature- monde” in France. Taking into account the manifesto published in the newspaper Le Monde in Paris in 2007—and reprinted in Montreal’s daily for intellectuals, Le Devoir, a few days later—I will argue that the case made for “littérature-monde” in the French-speaking world is conceived of in terms that are not applicable to Québécois literature in French. The usual symbolic structures that underlie this discourse ( centre/ périphérie; Nord/ Sud; littérature des Blancs contre celle des Noirs) are not appropriate to Québécois literature in French, given, among other elements, the very strong “institution littéraire” that has existed in the territory for at least the last 60 years and actually for a longer period of time. I will base my arguments in part on the manifesto and on contributions found in the book Pour une littérature-monde (2007) , published some months after the manifesto, and then contextualize them in the light of more recent contributions to the discussion. This article contains five parts: the professor, the context, the manifesto, reactions to the manifesto, and “Le cas du Québec,” in which I suggest an alternative model.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".