The Constraints of Literary Merit in Heidi L. M. Jacobs’ Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to examine how Heid L. M. Jacobs’ Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear employs its protagonist, Molly’s, experience within the academy to critique the constraints that literary merit standards place on scholarly work. First, I analyze how Jacobs manifests this argument through Molly’s professors, who criticize and penalize her for straying from the traditional essay format in her written assignments. Next, I look at how, by highlighting Molly’s struggle to reconcile her identity as a Canadian writer, this novel critiques the academic presupposition that authors can only achieve valuable content through the reproduction of canonical literary modes. Further, I consider how Jacobs calls literary merit into question by positing that written works that do not meet this standard can still have scholarly value. However, because Jacobs’ novel centres around a white, heteronormative, and academically-inclined protagonist, its investigation of the constraints of literary merit may be limited. I conclude with the argument that Molly of the Mall leaves readers to question what it means that even a character with a privileged relationship to the academy encounters these constraints.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".