Environmental issues in contemporary Canadian narrative literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
GGRW -Green Grass Running Water NCW -Never Cry Wolf OC -Oryx and Crake (e.g.Lost in the Barrens) is the Canadian North, the region will be discussed in its importance for the Canadian literary and environmental imagination.The Canadian North is a very ambiguous literary construct: on the one hand, it is often shown as a vulnerable wilderness that is compromised by human activity.On the other hand, it is also depicted as a very dangerous place to live in.I will show, however, that in Mowat, it is the first construction that prevails, and that in his work, nature is portrayed as a victim rather than a predator.Thomas King's stories also show a strong concern for nature, but his approach is more subtle than Mowat's.Of Native American background, King merges literary and oral tradition in his works.His unconventional stories often blur the boundaries between human and animal world, and between Indian and Western culture.His tone of writing, like Mowat's, is often ironic on the surface, but behind his comic and often bizarre stories lurks a highly serious and activist message.King also looks at the role of Native tribes in his confrontation of the 'natural' and the 'cultural' world.His stories often feature First Nations' people who are caught between stereotypes and modernity, alternatively placing them on the 'natural' or the 'cultural' side of Western discourse and showing parallels of their situation and environmental issues.King's narrative style is as unorthodox as the scenarios he proposes in his stories.In his environmentally concerned texts he seems to seek for a reconciliation of nature and culture -with tragicomic results, that make one wonder if such a reconciliation is indeed still possible.His works novel Green Grass, Running Water, that will be the main focus of this chapter, can therefore be seen as a bridge between Mowat's traditional approach and Margaret Atwood's apocalyptic visions, which will be treated in the next chapter.Margaret Atwood's novel Oryx and Crake will be the central part of the subsequent chapter.The story, like some of Thomas King's short stories, envisions a scenario beyond the present and, possibly, beyond the realistic.Oryx and Crake is set in a future that might become reality if Mowat's conservative and King's integrative approach to solving today's environmental issues fail.It is a highly disturbing dystopian novel, trying to raise awareness to the problems humanity might face in the future.Atwood is clearly in line with Mowat in her depiction of the precarious situation of nature as a victim at the hands of humanity.However, she goes further than Mowat.By employing what Garrard (2012: 103) calls 'apocalyptic rhetoric' she shows how in destroying nature humanity could ultimately wipe out itself (cf.Buell 2001: 30ff.).An example from her short story
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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 | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.079 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 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".