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Record W4414044238 · doi:10.15640/jflcc.v13p10

Myth as a Decolonial Force in Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners

2025· article· en· W4414044238 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
D. Ram Aurvind

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Foreign Languages Cultures and Civilizations · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicAnthropological Studies and Insights
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMythologyIndigenousNarrativeColonialismMeaning (existential)Identity (music)Poetry

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This paper examines the symbolic role of myth as a decolonial force in Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners, emphasising its function in cultural resistance and identity restoration. Through a poem embedded in the novel, Laurence dramatizes the Métis people’s cultural dislocation, where children’s inability to grasp its meaning reveals estrangement from their mother tongue and ancestral identity. This linguistic rupture signifies deeper spiritual and cultural loss under colonialism. Drawing on decolonial theory and Indigenous epistemologies, the paper argues that Laurence critiques colonial erasure of Indigenous myths and collective memory while simultaneously enacting cultural recovery. Myth emerges as both a site of rupture and a source of resilience, asserting suppressed voices and restoring identity. Ultimately, The Diviners reclaims myth as a living narrative force that resists domination and affirms the necessity of preserving cultural memory.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.012
Threshold uncertainty score0.028

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0120.025
Scholarly communication0.0050.004
Open science0.0010.006
Research integrity0.0020.005
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.010
GPT teacher head0.337
Teacher spread0.328 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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