Pop culture and the construction of ethnicity in Richard Van Camp's The Lesser Blessed and Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For Larry and Nomi, the protagonists of Richard Van Camp’s the Lesser Blessed (1996) and Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness (2004), wrestling with teenage angst is complicated by the issue of ethnicity and the claims their respective communities put on them. If you think that becoming an adult is tough enough, try becoming an Indian or a Mennonite in contemporary Canada. That is, in substance, what the two narrators are asking us. But the way they are telling their story, the energy and the refreshing humour they put into it, are well worth our attention in a context where CanLit - the CanLit which receives national awards and international attention - is being queried by some for the plain boredom it inspires in them : “One could say,” Douglas Coupland writes, “that CanLit is the literary equivalent of representational landscape painting, with small forays into waterfowl depiction and still lifes. It is not a modern art form, nor does it want to be” (The New York Times 2006). Modernity, however, features prominently in the two novels I propose to study in parallel, insofar as the strategies they resort to point to a shared experience of ethnicity which transcends individual allegiances to a given community. My analysis will concentrate on the ubiquitous references to pop culture which index contemporaneity in the two works, interrogating the stereotypes of the quaint Mennonite and the romantic Indian, two figures safely sealed within the amber light of the past.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".