Bridging the Past and the Future: Rethinking the Temporal Assumptions of Trauma Theory in Dionne Brand's <i>At the Full and Change of the Moon</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As an account of the descendants of a woman who is enslaved, tortured, and driven to assist a mass suicide in nineteenth-century Trinidad, Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon represents the intergenerational effects of traumatic experience. In accordance with the writings of theorists such as Cathy Caruth or Nicholas Abraham, who emphasize the disruptive – even trans-generational – persistence of traumatic events, this novel traces the haunting recurrence of images or sentiments associated with traumatic experience across generations. However, while some trauma theorists focus on the disruptiveness of traumatic memory when it recurs in the present, Brand's novel represents moments accompanying traumatic memories as pauses in time during which characters exercise agency. I argue that even when Brand's characters seem to be seized by the past, they also, often very subtly, evoke the future. Consequently, Brand's text supports the work of Ruth Leys, E. Ann Kaplan, and Richard McNally, which recognizes the role of psychic agency in accessing and responding to traumatic memory.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.048 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".