The mountain, the main, and the monuments: representations of Montreal in the Anglo-Quebec novel, 1945-2014
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The social and political changes in Quebec since the end of the Second World War have gone hand in hand with the minoritization of English in the province. "The Mountain, the Main, and the Monuments: Representations of Montreal in the Anglo-Quebec Novel 1945-2014" explores the way in which Anglo-Quebec novelists’ growing awareness of their marginality has impacted their representation of Montreal, especially in reconfiguring the myth of two solitudes both thematically and spatially. Drawing on postcolonial theory as well as on key approaches to space, I argue that Anglo-Quebec novelists’ treatment of space, both urban and textual, is directly related to their cultural ideology, that is, to their conception of what English-French relations are or should be. The dissertation engages in a close reading of six novels: Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes (1945), Scott Symons’s Place d’Armes (1967), Keith Henderson’s The Restoration: The Referendum Years (1987), Gail Scott’s Heroine (1987), Marianne Ackerman’s Jump (2000), and Heather O’Neill’s The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (2014). In these novels, the city’s specific landmarks might be read as physical representations of social, racial, and religious divides, but they might also emerge as sites of encounter, dispute, and exchange. The way in which novelists and their characters negotiate these divides or take part in these encounters mirrors the way in which they perceive, experience, or replicate marginality in establishing and questioning their own identity as part of an ever-shifting minority. Those authors who represent the city as an inert container in which social processes take place tend to emphasize the cleavage and binarism between the two cultural and linguistic groups, often counterbalancing this representation with an impulse towards synthesis. The textual space of their novels is correspondingly static in its adoption of more traditional narrative modes, language use, and structure. Conversely, Anglo-Quebec novelists who are inclined to highlight interdependence and interaction between French and English underscore the dynamic and dialectical nature of both urban and textual space.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".