Figuring Transition: Play, Performance, and Mimicry in Children’s Books by Thomas King, Mordecai Richler, and Margaret Atwood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Thomas King’s A Coyote Solstice Tale, Mordecai Richler’s Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, and Margaret Atwood’s Wandering Wenda and the Widow Wallop’s Wunderground Washery, the mimicry of the transitional characters is a platform for their satire. Mimicry is a neutral practice in and of itself and can be advocated as a model behaviour: the dictum to become the change one wants to see in the world suggests that, by imitating a not-yet-actual ideal, one can make that fiction reality. For Child, The Hooded Fang, and the Wizard/Widow, mimicry also dramatizes the intolerability of worlds that manipulate interpellative processes to reify power. The transitional figures in these three books work as models of the half-playful and half-perverse clinging to a way of life that pertains to a particular fictional world they endorse, reinforcing childhood as a desirable, dynamic, and powerful transitional state.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".