Anxious Preoccupations: Unearthing the Affective Dimensions of Settler Anxiety in Canadian Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation proposes that settler anxiety is a founding feature of Canadian literature and its criticism. Combining twentieth-century theories of anxiety with contemporary theory from settler colonial studies, I test this proposition by locating settler anxiety within the literary nationalism of 1970s Canada, demonstrating that anxiety about unbelonging on Indigenous lands undergirds, but is simultaneously obfuscated by, Northrop Frye’s conception of the garrison mentality and Margaret Atwood’s survivor/victim paradigm in The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (1971) and Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), respectively. Deploying relational approaches to questions of settler identity and belonging, I complicate Frye and Atwood’s containment of indigeneity within the realm of the symbolic by contextualizing their interventions alongside contemporaneous writing by sovereigntist activists George Manuel (Secwepemc) and Harold Cardinal (Cree). I then apply this critical rethinking to a close reading of settler anxiety in Margaret Laurence’s novel The Diviners (1974). The project argues for the necessity of returning to Frye and Atwood’s theories of Canadian identity because they have proven foundational to the development of Canadian literature as a field of study and its pedagogical engagement across secondary and postsecondary curricula, thereby registering significant impact that, I contend, reproduces the power dynamics of settler colonialism through Canadian literary studies. By returning to anxieties that undergird these theories, this dissertation rethinks settler affect both historically and in the present moment of supposed reconciliation to interrogate cultural processes that normalize settler attachments to colonial structures of power. In doing so, I endeavour to activate the settler anxieties of today in the direction of social justice and decolonial change.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".