Haptic Reading: Towards an Ethics of Touch in Canadian Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Haptic Reading explores why the sense of touch is so often overlooked in literary studies despite its aesthetic, political, and ethical significance. Expanding upon theories of touch, or the “haptic,” this project attempts to correct the history of touch’s elision by Western thought. Broadly speaking, the dissertation calls for the need to recognize how the haptic senses impact our encounters with literature—both works that perform ocularcentrism and those that respond to and deconstruct it through the haptic. Specifically, this dissertation argues for an understanding of the haptic’s importance to and in Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers (1966), Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972), Timothy Findley’s The Wars (1976), and Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1988), four twentieth-century Canadian novels that draw upon different sub-senses of touch through the first-person narrative perspectives of historians, documentary filmmakers, and archivists who attempt vicariously to experience, access, and possess the stories of others. Each chapter maintains that the haptic works to unsettle certain social, gendered, and political values assigned to particular bodies—values often reinforced through a visual register. Furthermore, each chapter complicates the haptic’s role in facilitating forms of physical and affective violence: Chapter One addresses the gendered and epistemic violence associated with historical study and political action in Beautiful Losers; Chapter Two explores the violent touch of the male gaze, symbolized by the documentary camera lens in Surfacing; Chapter Three reads the haptic details of trench warfare but also implicates the haptic in scenes of sexual violence in The Wars; and Chapter Four links the physical and affective conditions of manual labour witnessed throughout In the Skin of a Lion to the haptic conditions of storytelling. Taken together, these novels reveal a shared interest in the ethical stakes and limitations of literary representation, epitomized by characters whose chosen occupations compel them to touch, sense, and reflect upon their responsibility to others.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.069 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| 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".