Landed: Labour, literature, and the politics of mobility in twentieth-century Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the currency of interrogations of the so-called natural emanation of cohesive identities from particular geographical spaces, there has not yet been a sustained critical examination of how relationships between identity and place in Canada are articulated in literary representations of labour. While there is an important historical relationship between the conventions of literary realism and representations of labour, the representation of what I call "mobile labour" in literature published since 1930 almost exclusively occurs in literary forms that in some way experiment with the conventions of literary realism. In particular, these diverse texts demonstrate the contradictions embodied in what Raymond Williams calls the realist convention of the "knowable community." This thesis employs theorizations of citizenship in historically attentive ways to analyze how writers from various periods use the theme of mobile labour to either explore the impossibility of the "knowable community" or to lament its passing. Part One analyzes the rail-riding and road motifs of the Depression era in short fiction and poetry published in leftist magazines, in Irene Baird's novel Waste Heritage (1939), and in Hugh Garner's novel Cabbagetown (1968). These chapters explore how a distinction between native-born vagrants and foreign-born immigrants emerged in socialist and social realist writing as a means of asserting the white, Anglo mobile labourer's claim to the nation and, by extension, to the social rights of citizenship that became such an important component of the social welfare state in the postwar period. Part Two of the study turns to fiction published since the late 1960s. Chapter Three considers the contradictory tension between nostalgic realism, the sedentarist assumptions of literary regionalism, and diasporic labour practices in Alistair MacLeod's fiction. Chapter Four looks at Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion and posits that the novel's postmodern "nomadic metaphysics" privileges mobility and deterritorialization, while simultaneously erasing the diversity it ostensibly celebrates. The final chapter discusses the work of Afro-Caribbean writers in Canada and argues that their use of counterrealist satire promotes a cosmopolitan ethics of reading and a model of negotiated citizenship that offers a potential alternative to the binary of sedentarist and nomadic thinking that I trace throughout the project.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.047 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".