Guests, Hosts and Parasites: Deviant Hospitality in Katherena Vermette’s The Break
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“The Break” is the name given to a strip of empty land in a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of Winnipeg, the provincial capital of Manitoba and the setting of Katherena Vermette début novel. It is also the place where, on a winter’s night, a group of assailants caught up with a thirteen-year-old Indigenous girl and raped her within earshot of the neighbouring houses. The novel’s choral composition relies on alternating viewpoints to throw light on the assault’s circumstances, the factors that turned into a catalyst for the rape, and a combination of facts which, even as it is slowly revealed, blurs the line between victim and perpetrator. The crime and its antecedents are initially envisaged from within the Indigenous and Métis community, but the characters’ lives are also replaced in the wider context of the colonial history that has shaken the foundations of home and homeland for Canada’s First Nations. In The Break, storytelling and story listening both necessitate the taking into account of entropy, i.e. the parasitic interference or white noise caused by transmission, especially when vast distances separate the teller from the audience invited to listen in. To understand the various regimes and functions of hospitability in Vermette’s novel, the essay will be relying on the theory of communication Michel Serres develops while relying on the paradigm of the parasite, an organism that feeds on another without giving anything in return, so as to modelize relations between strangers who occupy the same space without sharing it.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".