Understanding Emily Carr: A look at the fashioning of an autonomous self
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this thesis, I argue that Emily Carr's books reveal her quest to define herself as an artist and as a person, drawing inspiration from an Authority manifest in the Pacific Northwest forest and pushing against conventions that would have limited her and suffocated her as well as her art. I endeavour an original exploration of print culture, in examining how this author discovered herself through books, and Canadian modernism, in charting how this talented woman found a vocation in the early twentieth century. As Emily Carr's conflicted public image has complicated critical discussion of her literary oeuvre, my thesis investigates how this specific artist figure has been constructed and (mis)understood. I begin with an overview and brief discussion of Carr's critical reception history, and then focus on a detailed examination of Carr's individual writings. Thus, I probe two often clashing perspectives while I argue that only in submitting to Carr's personal gaze, regardless of her subjectivity, can we approximate a better understanding of the artist's thought processes and motivations. By applying Stephen Greenblatt's theory of "self-fashioning" to the premise of my analysis, Carr's early formed self-image and ensuing self-representation in writing become both apparent and legitimate. In this study, I uncover and trace the fascinating development of Carr's self-concept, as an artist and as a person, as it unfolds in and beyond the three cornerstones of her literary oeuvre: Klee Wyck (1941), The Book of Small (1942), and Growing Pains (1946). By way of interpreting the corpus of almost all of Carr's books, and considering most of the diverse criticism on them, I demonstrate how she made herself into who she needed to be – artist, outsider, Canadian, Indigenous ally, advocate of animal and child, author, friend.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".