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Record W7038443657

The home front : a novel

2008· dissertation· en· W7038443657 on OpenAlexaboutno aff

Bibliographic record

VenueMspace (University of Manitoba) · 2008
Typedissertation
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicOral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsHome frontSurrenderFront (military)SisterPrisonSpanish Civil WarPrisoners of warWorld War II
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The Home Front is set in Winnipeg during World War II, between 1941 and 1945.It is the story of a young girl, the eldest of three siblings, whose father, a member of The Winnipeg Grenadiers, is a prisoner of war in Hong Kong.The Grenadiers were sent in the autumn of l94l to take part in the defense of the British colony of Hong Kong.Insufficiently tained and under strength, the Grenadiers were ill prepared for battle.Their commander, Brigadier Lawson, was confident that with a few more months of training they would be fit for combat, but this was not to be.War with Japan was imminent, and it broke out on December 7 with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.The next day the Japanese attacked Hong Kong.Although the troops fought valiantly, they were forced to surrender on Christmas Day.Many of the men died in battle, and many more died during the four years of incarceration during which they were treated brutally and forced to perform hard labour while barely surviving on a starvation diet.The prison cnmps lacked sanitation, grd many of the deaths were due to diseases such as beriberi, dysentery, diphtheria and typhoid.Their hardships ended with the end of the war in August 1945.The Home Front does not particularly concern itself with that narrative, but it does locate there Victor Dennis, ttre young protagonist's father, and one of the luc ones-he retumed to his family in September 1945.The protagonist, Moir4 is the eldest of three children.She is seven years old in the beginning, her sister Barbaa is five and their brother Roger just two.Their mother Lucy, who While the material in this story is drawn from my personal memory, and while the narrative might point toward memoir,I have chosen to fictionalize it in order to gain gteater freedom in my vwiting.The novel is written in the third person in order to remove myself as author from my own story as I tum it into discowse.I have centred the narrative in the young girl,s consciousness by drawing out her innermost thoughts and feelings, in part by the use of free indirect discourse, as in the incident on the beach where Moira discovers that her sister is missing, and when she wonders what her mentally challenged cousin Charlie is thinking as he gazesinto space.Some other examples of the use of free indirect discourse are the description of Lucy's angst while waiting for her husband to come to the boarding house, and her tears of frustration when he leaves her alone with the children on the train back to Winnipeg.Also, through the use of free indirect discourse I have depicted Moira's fear and con-firsion over the possibitity of catching scarlet fever.There is throughout the novel a blending of the omniscient narrator's voice with the girl's in order to cente in the girl's point of view without surrendering to first-person narative.I have utilized diary entries, which I have structured using a child's language in order to get inside Moira's mind and convey her point of view.The flust-person narration in these excerpts allows me to show events and feelings as Moira experiences them.I have also used a "child's" font in order to suggest the chirography of the young girl.Another way in which I have tried to get inside the child's mind is the employment of Victor Shklovs's method of describing objects rather than naming them.For example, I have done this in describing the contents of the doctor's black bag.Moira is intimately familiar with this bag, as the doctor has paid visits to her in the past and she has experienced the discomfort of having her tongue depressed and her ears probed, and felt the cold of the stethoscope on her bare different foods, the smells of houses and rooms and the sights that Moira encounters.She has an intense awateness of all these things, and I think that her perceptions bring the manuscript to life.Robert Kroetsch, in his memoir "D-Day and After", writes of creating a scrapbook about the war.This, in part, is what I have done.However, I believe that this novel is much more than a collection of memories.Through the use of sensory images and the creation of a sensitive, intuitive protagonist, I have brought to life the psychological impact

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.925
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0020.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.024
GPT teacher head0.193
Teacher spread0.169 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2008
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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