Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the oddities of Canadian literary criticism – especially of the anglophone side – is its reluctance to canvass materials that revel in the shocking, the sensational, the scatological, the sordid, even if such revelling is conducted with consummate respect for highbrow, academic standards that must be met if the works in question are to be canonized upon university syllabi. This article maintains that Anglo Can-Lit critics look askance at Canadian “pulp fiction” genres (even Harlequin romances) because of the inherited, British, colonial-imperial predisposition to distrust materials “pandering” to popular taste as works that, pleasing the public, must be purple in prose, black in morals, yellow in paper quality, and pornographic blue in depicting sexuality. The point is proven in reference to case studies of the receptions of should-be (or could-be) canonical Can-Lit works: Marian Engel’s novel Bear (1976), John Glassco’s semi-fictionalized Memoirs of Montparnasse (1970), Dorothy Proctor (and Fred Rosen)’s “true crime” saga Chameleon (1994), Stephen Vizinczey’s novel In Praise of Older Women (1965), and Stephen Williams’s “true crime” work Invisible Darkness: The Strange Case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka (1996). The long-term, Can-Lit, critical reaction to these texts foregrounding lust and bloodlust, crime and punishment, perversion and subversion seems to be a quiet dismissal following cordial accordance of due notoriety, despite the simultaneous acknowledgement of literary merit. Ultimately, the Anglo-Canuck penchant for disdaining “pulp” literature as outré (that is, “American”) furthers the marginalization of already racially and/or sexually marginalized and/or (ex-)incarcerated and/or poverty-stigmatized Canadian writers.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".