MIRRORING SPACES OF WILDERNESS AND OBSESSION IN ALICE MUNRO’S “VANDALS”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Short stories by Alice Munro merge autobiographical themes with remarkable language and stirring imagery. This paper analyzes the impact of ‘wilderness’ and mirrors the complexities of the obsession with the human psyche in the lives of the characters of Alice Munro’s short story “Vandals”. She portrays the evil and the threat that prevails in the wild and its hazardous impact on the psychology of its characters where they face cognitive clinical manias. The objective of the present paper is to read “Vandals” with reference to Bertrand Westphal’s theory of ‘geocriticism’ as proposed in his book Real and Fictional Spaces (2007) to identify the psychic disorders that Ladner, Bea, and Liza possess in the story. The wilderness that is constantly set against civilization or the urban space, distorts perception and selfperception, which metaphorically is an intrusion into the mental space of an individual. The characters are driven by intrusive thoughts and dysfunctional beliefs which lead to the suppression of their thoughts and psychological obsession after encountering the wilderness of Canada. This essay analyses Alice Munro’s depiction of this Gothic setting through the Canadian environment and the character’s preoccupation with the wild. The significance of the wilderness as a place, both in its ‘physical’ and ‘abstract’ representations in Munro’s stories, has been attempted to be discussed.
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 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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".