Margaret Laurence’s Living-Room War: Bringing Violence Home in<i>The Fire-Dwellers</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Margaret Laurence’s The Fire-Dwellers (1969) meditates on episodes of racialized and colonial violence occurring around the world as the news brings images of the Vietnam War and shootings of African American men into Stacey MacAindra’s Canadian home. This article assesses what Laurence called the novel’s “audio-visual” form. It reads the descriptions of TV reports and newspaper photographs in the novel alongside Judith Butler’s and Susan Sontag’s writing on war photography and Caroline Levine’s recent work on literary forms. Contextualizing Laurence’s central metaphor of the house on fire in the mass-mediated reception of “television’s war” and Canadian responses to violence in Vietnam and the United States, the article examines the debate over ethical witnessing embedded in the novel’s preoccupation with what John Berger called “photographs of agony” and argues that The Fire-Dwellers is an important text for scholars involved in the current reappraisal of Laurence as a political writer.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".