The Destruction of Nationalism in Twenty-First Century Canadian Apocalyptic Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article argues that, since the turn of the twenty-first century, fiction in Canada – whether by English-Canadian, Québécois, or Indigenous writers – has seen a re-emergence in the apocalyptic genre. While apocalyptic fiction also gained critical attention during the twentieth century, this initial wave was tied to disenfranchised, marginalized figures, excluded as failures in their attempts to reach a promised land. As a result, fiction at that time – and perhaps equally so in the divided English-Canadian and Québécois canons – was chiefly a (post)colonial, nationalist project. Yet, apocalyptic fiction in Canada since 2000 has drastically changed. 9/11, rapid technological advancements, a growing climate crisis, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: these changes have all marked the fictions of Canada in terms of futurities. This article thus examines three novels – English-Canadian novelist Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), Indigenous writer Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle (2014), and Québécois author Nicolas Dickner’s Apocalypse for Beginners (2010) – to discuss the ways in which they work to bring about the destruction of nationalism in Canada through the apocalyptic genre and affectivity to envision new futures.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 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".