Geväret och Landskapet : Ekokritiska och Postkoloniala spår i The Rifles Naturgestaltningar
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay examines the 1994, Vollmann novel The Rifles through a postcolonial ecocritical lens. It answers the following questions: How is nature and landscapes depicted in The Rifles? How is the relationship between humans and nature portrayed, and how does this relationship differ among the characters in The Rifles? How does The Rifles represent the human exploitation of nature and the Canadian indigenous population? This essay uses the postcolonial ecocritical theories of Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, especially their ideas of “neocolonialism” and “the tourist and the native”. Another theoretical foundation for this essay is the theories of Timothy Morton in the book Dark Ecology, mainly the theory about “strange loops”. There isn’t a lot of previous research in this category, but Catherine Lanone has a similar idea, that The Rifles depicts nature in a state of decay. Lanone argues that this is white intrusion is the reason for the state of decay, while this essay argues that it is the technology of said intruders that is the reason for decay: the rifle. This essay shows that the rifle is starting point of the way the novel depicts nature. And that the relation between the rifle and nature is in a so-called strange loop. This essay also comes to the conclusion that the novel generally depicts two types of characters “the tourist” and “the native”, and that the way these two types of characters depicts nature differs, the tourists are naïve, while the natives are in a state of realist, melancholy-nostalgia.
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 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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
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".