'Dialectical Laurence.' Review of Ancestors and Gods: Margaret Laurence and the Dialectics of Identity by David Lucking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The titular phrase ancestors and gods betrays much and, at the same time, very little about this book's real subject: Margaret Laurence's dialectics. Other sets of Laurentian binaries might have served just as well for a title: order and disarray, for example, or then and now. These phrases also appear frequently in Laurence's and the precise meaning of each term, and therefore the relationship between the terms in each pair, are constantly shifting. That these binaries are so interchangeable is precisely Lucking's point: the phrase ancestors and gods serves as a representative paradigm for an ambivalence pervading the whole of Laurence's work, often expressed in terms of tension between two apparent opposites. Lucking, who is a professor of English at the University of Lecce in Italy, continues to participate in the conversation about Canadian literature on both sides of the Atlantic- itself a dialectical activity of sorts.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".