From a poetics of collision to a hermeneutics of discovery : rethinking knowledge, ecology, and history in Rudy Wiebe's A Discovery of Strangers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this essay, I argue that Rudy Wiebe's A Discovery of Strangers (1994) contributes to destabilizing and dissolving the rigid boundaries set up by monological and dualistic epistemology. This novel of historiographic metafiction illustrates well the dialogical nature of postcolonial environmental literature. The novel represents the exploration of Arctic Canada in the nineteenth century both from the storytelling perspective of the indigenous Dene community, the Tetsot'ine, and from the historical perspective of the English explorers. This narrative configuration is not antithetical, for it causes the reader to reexamine the hyperseparation of history and story, fact and fiction, and colonial and indigenous ecological knowledge. Instead of separating these binaries, Wiebe's novel unites them through a poetics of collision and a hermeneutics of discovery. In this context, the act of reading is both creative and critical: it consists in piecing together this polyvocal storyworld, and by doing so, to question North American colonial history from a double perspective. In reading A Discovery of Strangers, one enacts dialogism and is made to reflect on it. Ultimately, the reader's responsibility is twofold: it consists in unveiling the harmful exclusion of differences while asserting the need for creative dialogue.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.104 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 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".