17: Realism and Parodic Postmodernism: Audrey Thomas, “Aquarius” (1971)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A udrey T homas, born in 1935, is one of the leading short-story writers in a period that may well come to be called the Golden Age of the Canadian short story. Like Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant, with whom she is often grouped, Thomas has been influenced not only by great international forerunners such as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway, but also by other Canadian writers and literary activists including Frederick Philip Grove, Sinclair Ross, and Ethel Wilson, who prepared the reading public for the international breakthrough of Canadian literature in the 1960s. Earlier, Morley Callaghan ( A Native Argosy , 1929; Now That April's Here , 1936) had introduced the Canadian public to the modernist style in the short story (Thacker 2004, 184), while Robert Weaver and John Metcalf had created — through CBC programs such as Anthology (1953–85) — a literary milieu in which short stories were regarded not merely as merchandise and entertainment but were also appreciated as a serious art form. Since 1983 some 600 short-story collections by individual writers have been published (Thacker, 190), and the range of short stories presented in anthologies, for example Margaret Atwood and Robert Weaver's The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (1995) is impressive. With this abundance of competitors, among them Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, and Margaret Atwood, Audrey Thomas's success is well-earned. Today her novels and short stories, in which realistic and parodic elements interact in subtle ways, are highly regarded as sophisticated fiction (Davey 1986, 5; Gillam 1996, 2; Kleiman 2000, 660). Unlike the early Atwood, for instance, Thomas is not a cultural nationalist but belongs to the large group of Canadian writers who, having non-Canadian roots, add an international dimension to the nation's culture. Born in Binghampton, New York, and educated at Smith College, Massachusetts, and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, she undertook a Grand Tour of Europe, lived in Ghana, Greece, France, and England, and traveled to French West Africa, Senegal, and Mali before buying a house on Galiano Island, in the Gulf of Georgia, British Columbia. Like Alice Munro and other female authors of her generation, she had to reconcile her profession with her role as housewife and mother (Munro 1998, x).
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
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".