Ambivalent Visions: Dreams, Bereavement, and Belonging in Contemporary Canadian Memoirs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines the prominent intersections between dreams, representations of bereavement, and negotiations of social and geographic belonging in ten contemporary Canadian memoirs. Dreams are a remarkably common device in the genre, most often appearing in accounts of family members' deaths or staging encounters with deceased others and originary landscapes. I argue that these dreams operate as ambiguously authorizing and paradoxically reassuring spaces of contradiction and reconnection that convey the ambivalence of contemporary responses to death and displacement. As such, I suggest that dreams are prevalent in memoirs because they align with the genre's characteristic focus on personal and social relationships and its irresolvable tensions between representations of self and other, private and public, and desire and detachment. The four chapters theorize dreams through the lenses of bereavement studies, elegy studies, diaspora studies, and body and affect studies, considering how they adapt the conventions of literary modes such as dream-vision, elegy, and pastoral to address contemporary concerns. Chapter One argues that memoirs frequently link premonitory dreams, deathbed visions, and dreams of the dead in 'narratives of dying' that assert the possibility of continued subjectivity after death, with reference to memoirs by Daphne Marlatt, Wayson Choy, and Philip Roth. Chapter Two considers the similarities between the use of dreams in memoirs and poetic elegies, analyzing memoirs and poetry by Lorna Goodison and Patrick Lane to argue that dreams problematize the possibility of speaking for the dead and act as a form of elegiac compensation in both genres. Chapter Three examines diasporic memoirs by Wayne Johnston, Janice Kulyk Keefer, and Michael Ondaatje, theorizing the circumscribed, originary landscapes depicted in dreams as sites of simultaneous nostalgia and irony, reminiscent of complex forms of the pastoral. Finally, Chapter Four argues that memoirs' tendency to privilege embodied and affective responses to dream experience enables memoirists such as Choy, Rudy Wiebe, and Sharon Butala to claim affective affiliations that extend beyond the family. Ultimately, this study posits that dreams’ ability to articulate relational tensions within a solipsistic psychological form offers a strategically non-committal and open-ended way of representing loss and belonging in contemporary Canadian memoirs.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".