Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper addresses cultural constructions of old age in two contemporary Canadian care home narratives. While John Mighton’s play Half Life (2005) is set in a prison-like long-term care facility that is represented as a site of homogenization, oppression, and infantilization, Joan Barfoot’s novel Exit Lines (2008) plays in a hotel-like retirement lodge for wealthy customers that, despite its authoritarian manager, functions as a site of meaningful identity development and intragenerational relationships. What both texts have in common, however, is that they focus on residents’ individual resistance, subversion, and agency, thus opposing the ageist stereotype of decline and deconstructing prevailing norms and negative images of old age as merely physical decrepitude and disease. How is the space of the care home narrated in these two contemporary Canadian texts, and what role do aspects of space and place play for the narrative construction of old age? In this paper, I argue that the spatiality of aging is a category that needs to be incorporated into both an analysis of literary representations of the “fourth age” and an exploration of critical issues of space and place. The juxtaposition of two caregiving institutions in recent Canadian fction contributes to revealing how old age is imagined at the beginning of the twenty-frst century.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".