The Joual Effect: A Reflection of Quebec's Urban Working-Class in Michel Tremblay's Les Belles-soeurs and Hosanna
Bibliographic record
Abstract
abstract: Michel Tremblay, one of the most renowned and beloved Quebecois writers, began his literary career in the 1960s. He is well known for writing many of his works exclusively in the Quebec dialect of joual. The history of Quebec, from its beginnings as a permanent settlement of New France, to its subsequent takeover by the British after the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763, all were events that set the stage for the Quiet Revolution. The Quiet Revolution was a cultural, social and linguistic uprising set in motion by the French-speakers of Quebec who were tired of being dominated. Up until the 1960s, the majority of literary works produced in Quebec followed the classical French tradition. The desire in the 1960s to break free from the domination of the English language and culture as well as to be differentiated from the French from France brought with it a newfound nationalistic pride. From this point forward there was a push to create a distinct Quebecois literature. One way to differentiate the works of Quebec from those from France was to include characters and settings from within the Quebec society as well as to have those characters speak in their native dialect. Joual, a dialect version of the pronunciation of the French word cheval, meaning horse, was originally a rural dialect that eventually found its way to the inner city. For this reason, joual was most closely identified with the urban working-class of Montreal. This dialect was also perceived as the language of an uneducated, socially and economically inferior segment of the French-speaking Quebec society. By using joual in his literature, Tremblay was able to depict the social, cultural and economic effect that joual had on this element of Quebec's population. This thesis focuses on the impact of joual on this society through the study of two of Tremblay's plays: Les Belles-soeurs (1965), to show a women's perspective about a socially and economically inferior group, and Hosanna (1973), to show the perspective of homosexuals and transvestites, a socially prejudiced group.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.041 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.001 |
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.
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".