Alice Munro’s <i>The View from Castle Rock</i> (2007): An Example of “Historiographic Metafiction”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Linda Hutcheon coined the term "historiographic metafiction" in Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History (1989) to denote one of the key features of postmodernist literature, the omnipresent interconnection between history and fiction.The literary works of "historiographic metafiction" prove that historical events are transformed into facts by relying on the interpretation of documents that are merely representations of the past and subject to the attitudes of the person that recorded them.Thus the idea of history as an objective science is completely demystified.In the paper, Hutcheon's insights are applied to Munro's The View from Castle Rock (2007) that depicts the immigrant experience of the author's ancestors from 18 th century Scotland to Canada.Though based on the outline of a true narrative, Munro herself claims that the initial idea of writing her family history has expanded into fiction thus validly exemplifying Hutcheon's concept of "historiographic metafiction".Munro's narrative technique combines the realist method of portraying historically accurate facts, events and persons and postmodernist method of deconstructing historical figures and events by fictionalizing them.Other characteristics of postmodern historical fiction present in The View from Castle Rock (parody, irony, didactic rhetoric, linear narrative, etc.) are further explored in the paper.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".