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Record W4415401731 · doi:10.3828/bjcs.2025.11

A material thought surfaces in Margaret Atwood’s <i>Surfacing</i>

2025· article· en· W4415401731 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Xinghui Dong

Bibliographic record

VenueBritish Journal of Canadian Studies · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicUtopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsOpposition (politics)MaterialismPoliticsFemininityHumanismBinary oppositionDemocracy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This article argues that Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972) offers a material thought that engages with the emerging New Materialist feminist insights. By contrasting with the concurrent second-wave feminism, which often sought to deny certain physical characteristics of women, Atwood embraces the inherent traits of femininity and facilitates the protagonist’s reconnection with her body through a return to the wilderness. As the protagonist interacts with the material nature around her, she comes to understand that her body is not a fixed entity but a trans-corporeal, fluid body that is open to and engaged in exchange with its surroundings. The protagonist also symbolises the oppressed Canadian national identity. In opposition to the European humanist logic represented by Americans, she emphasises a kinship, as described by Donna Jeanne Haraway, where all humans and non-humans share a common flesh, shape through interaction, and co-constitute one another. Ultimately, by exploring the fluidity of the protagonist’s body and identity, Atwood envisions a post-human democratic politics where humans and non-humans coexist as equals, fostering interdependence and co-evolution rather than domination or exploitation.

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)0.003
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: none
Teacher disagreement score0.947
Threshold uncertainty score0.105

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0190.043
Scholarly communication0.0100.006
Open science0.0010.004
Research integrity0.0040.006
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.030
GPT teacher head0.243
Teacher spread0.214 · 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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