Cold City Space : Representations of Montreal in Pierre Szalowski's "Le froidmodifie la trajectoire des poissons" and Alix Ohlin's "Inside"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Representations of cold are investigated in two Montreal novels, Alix Ohlin's Inside (2012) and Le froid modifie la trajectoire des poissons by Pierre Szalowski (2007).The concept of seasonal nordicity provides the context for considering Montreal, a major urban agglomeration in southern Canada, as a location of "North".Ohlin's novel depicts cold as multifaceted, at times perpetuating and contesting received interpretations of cold as negative and associated with death.Szalowski's cheerful portrayal of the 1998 Ice Storm in Montreal celebrates cold's power to unite a community.The effect of cold on the spatiality of the narratives, in particular Foucault's concept of heterotopias, is examined.This paper investigates representations of cold in twenty-first century Montreal fiction through the lens of Alix Ohlin's Inside (2012) and Le froid modifie la trajectoire des poissons by Pierre Szalowski (2007).Montreal novels written in French and English are compared to determine if the cold is depicted differently in current anglophone and francophone urban fiction. 2 Which spaces in the city are figured and how does cold affect the spatiality of the 1 I gratefully acknowledge funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Brigitte-Schlieben-Lange Program of the government of Baden-Württemberg, Germany. 2 I use the term "urban fiction" following Caroline Rosenthal, who argues persuasively that the genre of "city fiction" should be "restricted to a decisively limited corpus of modernist texts, because it is closely connected to modernist perceptions of the city, to modernist understandings of identity and space, and to modernist modes of representation."
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.027 | 0.001 |
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".