Another face of justice : interpretative debates within the Canadian trial novel after 1970
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines Canadian works of fiction that contain historical trial narratives and that enact an adversarial trial of their own for an implied reader who acts as 'appellate judge.'' Included are four Canadian novels published after 1970 that fictionalize the circumstances leading to notorious criminal trials: Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace (1996), Lynn Crosbie's Paul's Case: The Kingston Letters (1997), and Rudy Wiebe's The Temptations of Big Bear (1973) and The Scorched-Wood People (1977). They represent commentaries on the justice or injustice done to convicted murderer Grace Marks (whose trial took place in 1843), to rebel Cree chief Big Bear and Metis leader Louis Riel (1885), and to serial rapists and killers Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo (1993, 1995). Each work reproduces excerpts from the original trial yet also represents a response to the historical trial's unfolding. This adversarial response takes the form of a trial-like narrative (or counternarrative) that engages with the original trial. Consequently each of these works is what I call a 'trial novel' that raises fundamental questions about justice and citizenship. Chapter One analyzes Atwood's Alias Grace and lays bare the fictional constructs included in a trial narrative. Chapter Two looks at Crosbie's Paul's Case and pits the judicial system's claim to sober neutrality against a more populist version of justice based on affect and revenge. Finally, Chapter Three, which is devoted to Wiebe's novels, studies the conflict of normative universes implicit in trials for treason and posits that rebel nomoi are as coherent as the dominant ones that quash them. Three communities are implicit in these novels and enter into a debate with one another: at the core of each work is a historical community of persons (the accused, attorneys, the judge, jurors, and members of the Canadian public) mobilized around an actual crime. This original community and its judgment provide the inspiration for the fictional community of the novel, which grapples with its own version of the crime and trial. Finally, an imaginative community of readers deliberates upon the questions raised both by the original trial and by the 'trial novel'.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".