Symptomatic Elegies: Ideology and Melancholy in Dennis Lee and Eli Mandel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The CanLit boom of the 1960s and 1970s involved the canonization of a cultural identity preoccupied with a perceived loss of political sovereignty to the United States and, more generally, to the dynamics of capitalist modernity. This article proposes that this emerging identity promoted an ideology that made the loss of sovereignty appear inevitable and concealed the possibility of political resistance. The article takes as case studies Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies and Eli Mandel’s “On the 25th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz Memorial Services, Toronto, January 25th, 1970 YMHA Bloor and Spadina.” Bringing together diverse fields of Canadian Studies (literature, history, and philosophy) and drawing from contemporary political and historical theory, this article explores how these poems, despite their differences in form and subject matter, partake in the same melancholic fantasy of powerlessness – a fantasy akin to the one that would come to hold sway over the global zeitgeist in the late twentieth century and beyond.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".