I Am Not the Best of Witnesses: (Anti-)Narrative Voice in Alice Munro’s “Home”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The New York Times recently called Canadian author Alice Munro “one of the greatest short story writers not just of our time but of any time.” Munro, who was born in Huron County in 1931, still lives in the region and has set much of her work in the area, writing with nuanced depth and accuracy that has led the publishing and literary world to affectionately refer to the region as “Alice Munro Country.” Over the course of her career, Munro has typically first published her short stories in magazine venues, such as the New Yorker, and every four or so years, collected these stories into book form. The story “Home,” first published in 1974 is a rare exception; it was originally published in a more obscure source, with Munro stating that it was “sort of a final statement” about her “dissatisfaction with art.” Yet a revised form of this story resurfaced in 2006 when it was published in Munro’s semi-autobiographical book The View from Castle Rock, a collection of stories that in a characteristically postmodern fashion, blurs the boundaries among the genres of memoir, history, and fiction. I will discuss why “Home,” and its peculiar publication history, highlight larger themes within Alice Munro’s work: her portrayals of ambivalence towards family and “home” itself; her self-consciousness with regards to writing fiction that is at the same time about places, people, and history from the “real” world; and how these anxieties have shaped her writing style over time
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".