In visible cities : envisioning the Canadian prairie city in literature and film
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In my thesis I examine Robert Kroetsch's novel The Studhorse Man (1969), Aritha van Herk's novel Restlessness (1998), and Guy Maddin's film The Saddest Music in the World (2004) to determine how each work uses non-representational narrative strategies in order to reproduce the pedestrian experience of seeing the prairie city. In a tradition that is predominantly associated with rural landscapes, there is a struggle for artists who work outside of what has come to be known as "authentic" prairie symbols and themes: the empty and barren land, the farmer struggling with his fields, the lonely wife sequestered in her home. Such icons came to be established within the formative years of artistic development in the prairies. In literature, this movement is known as "prairie realism" and featured linear trajectories and narrative continuity. It was not until the latter half of the twentieth century that prairie literature began to react against these realist narrative forms and experiment with more fragmented, abstract forms that, instead of being based on linear trajectories, adopted spatial narrative constructions. Such spatialization abandons narrative continuity in order to more closely represent the mechanics of human perception. Instead of producing a mimetic style of narrative, which attempts to mirror the surface of the world resulting in a flat, one-dimensional plane, these artists produced a mimesis of effect, which attempts to mirror the workings of human consciousness resulting in a fragmented, multi-layered construction. Such a spatialization, I argue, allows artists to more easily enter into the urban prairie landscape because it effectively recreates the "imaginative reconstruction" the city's pedestrian must perform in order to make the "partial visibilities" of the cityscape comprehensible.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".