"Lacking an Emotional Country...": Motion, Instability, and the Female Cosmopolitan in the Fiction of Mavis Gallant
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Twentieth century Canadian expatriate writer Mavis Gallant (1922-2014) explores the lingering effects of authoritarian power on social instability through themes of transnational migration, displacement, and loss. A prolific author who published extensively in The New Yorker, Gallant writes stories that are exquisite yet disturbing reflections of life, many set in post-World War II Europe where travelers, migrants, expatriates, and exiles have been set adrift by the inhospitable conditions of social and political collapse. This thesis examines images of motion and instability that situate Gallant’s work as the cosmopolitan condition that both responds to globalization and, most importantly, resists the standardization of Westernized global culture. I address the question Rebecca L. Walkowitz asks in Cosmopolitan Style, “Do the unsettling methods of cosmopolitan art serve to resist the adverse realities of cosmopolitan culture? Or do they facilitate them?” in order to argue that women in Gallant’s fiction bear more of the weight of these “adverse realities” in their roles as mothers, daughters, and wives, entangled as they are in the continuing gender disparities of Western culture, and also in the more intimate power dynamics of marriage and family social structure (23). This thesis demonstrates that instability requires a broader awareness of the consequences of displacement as well as the abuses of authoritarian control.
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 imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".