Reading the ‘wordless unease’ in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Death by Landscape’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the way Margaret Atwood’s short story ‘Death by Landscape’ (1991) engages with the representational strategies of Canada’s celebrated Group of Seven artists. I situate my reading of Atwood’s work first within aesthetics, focusing on her subtle problematization of the masculine ideology and wilderness aesthetic of the Group of Seven. I argue that Atwood unsettles the dominant, virulently male tradition of representation of the wilderness by uncovering an alternative female narrative through an ekphrastic engagement with the paintings. By doing so she not only dismantles the concept of wilderness both as a physical space that women have limited access to and as an imaginary construct; but at the same time she also reconfigures the structure and the content of wilderness stories, and in fact the concept of wilderness itself. Atwood offers a counter-discursive revision of the male adventure and maturation story by deconstructing and restructuring traditional narrative practices to render the female experience visible. This article hopes to show that Atwood expands the possibilities of the adventure story and wilderness writing and creates room for a female version of the maturation story with a fundamentally different aesthetic.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".