“Anything Was Possible”: Gaps, Hypotheses, and Multiple Meanings in Alice Munro's “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Through a literary analysis of Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (1999), the article explores the theme of indeterminacy and gaps in the text and their impact on readers’ interpretation. Drawing on the concepts of Iser’s implied reader, Kukkonen’s embodied reader, and Abbot’s acceptance of unknowability, the article reveals how Munro engages readers in constructing hypotheses and continuously challenges them by introducing new insights, prompting revisions of interpretations. By exploring the deliberate indeterminacies in Munro’s narrative, this study aims to elucidate the interplay between authorial intention and the reader’s interpretive agency. The article also mentions the film adaptation of Munro’s short story by the Canadian director Sarah Polley, Away from Her (2006), and highlights the use of indeterminacy within the visual medium.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".