Between a rock and a soft place : postmodern-regionalism in Canadian and American fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study calls for a re-evaluation of contemporary regionalist literary theory. It argues that traditional models of the discourse have been too heavily influenced by nineteenth century realist aesthetics and political ideologies. Because most scholars continue to interpret regionalist texts according to a resolutely empirical reading of geography, literary regionalism has fallen out of touch with the new kinds of "unrealistic," generic landscapes that now dominate North American culture in the postindustrial era. Drawing heavily on recent work by postmodern geographers such as Edward Soja, David Harvey, Michael Dear and Derek Gregory, this project updates regionalist theory by "re-placing" the artificially stabilized reading of geography that dominated the nineteenth century with a more self-consciously spatialized reading of what Soja calls our contemporary "real-and-imagined" places. By grafting together traditional regionalism and postmodern spatial theory we improve on both contributing discourses. In a "postmodern-regionalist" literary criticism, traditional regionalism sheds its reputation for theoretical naivete, while the elusive abstractions of postmodern theory gain a real-world referent, and a specific geographical index. When we "read postmodernism regionally" - - when we aggressively interrogate where this kind of fiction comes from and the places it represents - - we realize that the canons of postmodern fiction in Canada and the United States have been influenced by two very different spatial epistemologies. Rather than being "determined" by their real geographies, Canadian and American postmodernism have been more directly influenced by two different readings of geography. Works by Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Don DeLillo demonstrate that American postmodernism often interprets social space according to what Henri Lefebvre calls the idealistic "the illusion of transparency," while texts by Canadian postmodernists such as Robert Kroetsch, Wayne Johnston and Guy Vanderhaeghe tend to fall under Lefebvre's more materialistic "illusion of opacity." The ambiguous figure of Douglas Coupland - - a Canadian writer most critics treat as an American - - puts the spatial conventions of postmodernism in both countries in sharp relief. In an American postmodernism, dominated by generic suburban settings, regions will almost always be seen as imaginary projections, while in a Canadian postmodernism, dominated by the Prairies, regions will almost always retain some sense of their material reality.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".