"Our unfixed vision": the undermining of vision in contemporary Canadian fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
W.J.T. Mitchell has declared this the age of the pictorial turn, an age in which vision is a source of anxiety and is being interrogated in multiple ways. This thesis examines how four Canadian authors have contributed to this discourse and how they have unfixed vision in their fiction. Alistair MacLeod, Alice Munro, Jane Urquhart, and Thomas King have made the problems of vision a problem for fiction, and their fiction invites discussion of both narratological and thematic attention to the problems of vision. These problems include the coercive, disciplinary, disembodied, gendered, idiosyncratic and unstable nature of vision. The writers I consider in this study have resisted the dominance of perspectival vision and have destabilized the power of the gaze. MacLeod's "Vision" demonstrates the roles of touch and voice in narrative in spite of the way that its title privileges vision. Munro's Who Do You Think You Are? troubles vision narratologically, by undermining the unitary point of view of the protagonist through whom the stories are focalized. The movable epistemological ground for the narrative perspective results in an instability that I examine in the context of anamorphism, and I employ Gerard Genette's distinction between "who speaks" and "who sees" to analyze the limitations of what can be "seen" by the narrator. Urquhart's treatment of vision in The Underpainter is thematically-focused, and my discussion of the novel centres on the visual art of the novel's narrator Austin Fraser. Fraser also embodies a gendered and politicized vision, and his perspective on his feminine and Canadian subjects is limited in ways that are politically troubling. The politicized gaze is also the subject of my study of King's Truth and Bright Water, in which I examine the panoptic tourist gaze. King highlights the neo-colonialism of the tourist gaze, and explores its desire for the Native-as-spectacle. The inhabitants of Truth and Bright Water resist, return, or ignore that gaze, and they foreground "Indian" stereotypes as tourist fantasies and as cultural productions.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".