Age discrimination, youth culture, and midlife in Richard B. Wright’s <i>In the Middle of a Life</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article approaches Canadian author Richard B. Wright’s 1973 novel In the Middle of a Life through the lens of critical age studies and offers a close reading of the text as a fictional engagement with the North American conversation about age discrimination in employment, a problem that the novel links to a wider cultural middle-ageism exacerbated by the rise of 1960s youth culture. Situating its 42-year-old protagonist’s struggles with finding work and with maintaining a relationship with his teenaged daughter in relation to nationalist anxieties about American cultural and economic imperialism, the novel reflects the ambivalence that characterised American debates about how age discrimination should be conceptualised and dealt with. At the same time, the novel attempts to imagine Canada as a space of intergenerational interdependence where the rights of older workers might be protected at a time when the political conversation about age discrimination in Canada was relatively undeveloped.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.043 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".