Self Writing and World Mapping in Tim Bowling’s Downriver Drift and The Paperboy’s Winter
Bibliographic record
Abstract
EnglishWidely acclaimed as one of the best living Canadian authors, Tim Bowling has cultivated several literary genres with great talent and verbal craftsmanship. He has published twelve poetry collections to date, two works of creative non-fiction, and five novels, including Downriver Drift (2000), The Paperboy’s Winter (2003), The Bone Sharps (2007), The Tinsmith (2012) and The Heavy Bear (2017). This article explores the epistemological power of Bowling’s fiction as a mode of knowing the self and the nonhuman environment. More specifically, bearing in mind fundamental ecocritical tenets, it analyses how his two earliest novels, Downriver Drift and The Paperboy’s Winter,evoke notions of dwelling and a compelling sense of place, as the natural environment in them is much more than mere backdrop to the narratives unfolding in their respective plots. Written in elegantly wrought language rich in poetic resonance, Bowling’s novels remind their readership that fiction is a powerful tool to investigate the human condition and our surrounding world, where the human and the nonhuman coexist on democratic terms. EnglishAclamado como uno de los mejores autores canadienses vivos, Tim Bowling ha cultivado diversos generos literarios con gran talento y pericia. Cuenta en su haber con doce poemarios hasta la fecha, dos obras de escritura creativa y cinco novelas, Downriver Drift (2000), The Paperboy’s Winter (2003), The Bone Sharps (2007), The Tinsmith (2012) y The Heavy Bear (2017). Este articulo explora el poder de la narrativa de Bowling como vehiculo de conocimiento del ser y del mundo natural. Concretamente, partiendo de premisas esenciales de la ecocritica, analiza como sus dos primeras novelas, Downriver Drift y The Paperboy’s Winter, evocan nociones de lo que entrana habitar un espacio y recrean la presencia del lugar, pues el entorno natural en ellas es mucho mas que un mero telon de fondo de las historias que relatan. Escritas en un lenguaje elegante y prenado de resonancias poeticas, las novelas de Bowling nos recuerdan a los lectores que la narrativa es una poderosisima herramienta que nos permite investigar la condicion humana y la realidad circundante, donde lo humano y lo no humano coexisten a la par.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".