Animals’ Mobilities in Popular Fiction: Time, Duration, and Desire in Sheila Burnford’s The Incredible Journey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Sheila Burnford’s 1961 novel The Incredible Journey, three domestic animals undertake an arduous trek through the forests of northern Ontario to be reunited with their owners and family. As an example of “homing instinct” stories, The Incredible Journey has been influential, notably as a result of the 1963 Disney film. The genre is easily dismissed as sentimentally anthropomorphic, but this paper treats Burnford’s novel as a sophisticated treatment of animals’ mobilities in terms of literary animal studies. Drawing on the philosophy of Henri Bergson, The Incredible Journey is presented as an adventure in time rather than in space, contrasting the human perspective of maps and miles with the Bergsonian concept of duration, the real experience of the passage of time, and with related themes of free will, instinct, and desire. This paper concludes that Burnford offers a less anthropocentric perspective on animals’ mobility.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".