Only by Knowing The Other Shalt Thou Know Thyself: Americanness and Britishness as Defining Forces for Canadianness in Hugh MacLennan’s Early Novels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the aftermath of World War II, Canada stood at a crossroads marked by mutual incomprehension and a lack of willingness to understand The Other on the part of both Anglo- and Franco-Canadians. At that time, its identity was only in the process of forming itself into a prospective national conscience. Hugh MacLennan was one of the few writers of that period to try to understand the full depths and intricacies of the historical burden characterizing the difficult coexistence of the two “Founding Nations.” In his specific, personal way, MacLennan tried to show and prove that these national, linguistic, social, as well as religious barriers should be finally abandoned as a matter of the past. Communicating his sympathies and understanding for the French-speaking “minority” within the whole of Canada through his novels may seem to be, yet is not, his primary goal. Another significant objective of his frequently didactic novels was to show the undeniably influential role of Britishness and Americanness in the process of “defining Canada’s Canadianness.” This issue was even more important than attempting to solve the endless, insoluble skirmishes between the English and French Canadians. Not only were the striking differences between Canadians, and Americans and the British a way to help define Canadianness, but the encounter(s) with The Other on the outside presented a potential prospect of solidifying and strengthening the “internal Canadian bond,” with MacLennan’s oeuvre contributing to the very definition of the modern Canadian nation’s identity. Taking into account views related to the post-colonial theories, the article (re)confirms the position of MacLennan aspiring to be the nation’s first true post-colonial (or non-colonial) writer.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| 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".