Escaping from allegories:cat’s eye and King Lear Escaping from allegories:cat’s eye and King Lear
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In her 1972 study of Canadian literature, aptly titled Survival, Margaret Atwood uses the symbol of the mirror to describe the difficulty faced by Canadian writers and artists, struggling to assert their voices in a country trying to define itself against a colonial past.Here, she sees Canada as squeezed between the overwhelming, colonizing powers of Great Britain on one side, and The United States on the other. In her view, a piece of art becomes a mirror. As she writes: If a country or a culture lacks such mirrors it has no way of knowing what it looks like; it must travel blind. If, as has long been the case in [Canada], the viewer is given a mirror that reflects not him but someone else, and told at the same time that the reflection he sees is himself, he will get a very distorted idea of what he is really like. He will also get a distorted idea of what other people are like: it’s hard to find out who anyone else is until you have found out who you are. (15-16) With its roots in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the mirror Atwood describes provides an unreliable reflection for burgeoning artists inCanada: up against the powerful countries that surround them she sees a major identity crisis. Sixteen years later, her 1988 novel, Cat’s Eye, treads similar ground, tracking as it does the passage of its protagonist—painter, Elaine Risley—through childhood in mid-century Canada to her development as an established artist in the 1980s. It is into this narrative that Atwood places extensive references to Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear—a play that deals with the notion of identity. Here, Lear’s question, “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” becomes Elaine’s, as she ventures back to Toronto to attend a retrospective of her work at a women’s art gallery named “Sub-Versions.” In her 1972 study of Canadian literature, aptly titled Survival, Margaret Atwood uses the symbol of the mirror to describe the difficulty faced by Canadian writers and artists, struggling to assert their voices in a country trying to define itself against a colonial past.Here, she sees Canada as squeezed between the overwhelming, colonizing powers of Great Britain on one side, and The United States on the other. In her view, a piece of art becomes a mirror. As she writes: If a country or a culture lacks such mirrors it has no way of knowing what it looks like; it must travel blind. If, as has long been the case in [Canada], the viewer is given a mirror that reflects not him but someone else, and told at the same time that the reflection he sees is himself, he will get a very distorted idea of what he is really like. He will also get a distorted idea of what other people are like: it’s hard to find out who anyone else is until you have found out who you are. (15-16) With its roots in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the mirror Atwood describes provides an unreliable reflection for burgeoning artists inCanada: up against the powerful countries that surround them she sees a major identity crisis. Sixteen years later, her 1988 novel, Cat’s Eye, treads similar ground, tracking as it does the passage of its protagonist—painter, Elaine Risley—through childhood in mid-century Canada to her development as an established artist in the 1980s. It is into this narrative that Atwood places extensive references to Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear—a play that deals with the notion of identity. Here, Lear’s question, “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” becomes Elaine’s, as she ventures back to Toronto to attend a retrospective of her work at a women’s art gallery named “Sub-Versions.”
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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 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.051 | 0.058 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".