'Many kinds of strong voices' : transnational encounters and literary ambassadorship in the fiction of Margaret Atwood and Hanan Al-Shaykh
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research began as an attempt to question to what extent a politics of solidarity and the evolution of a ‘transnational feminism’ which travels across borders can be established within Arab and Western literary novels. While this study, in spirit, takes its lead from the call for ‘feminism without borders’ within the writings of two contemporary women writers, the Canadian Margaret Atwood and the Lebanese Hanan Al-Shaykh, it responds to the notion of transnationalism and literary ambassadorship from the perspective of Arab-Western relations. This process raises key questions for the reading of women’s writings across sensitive cultural divides: How can the literary contributions of Margaret Atwood and Hanan Al-Shaykh help in reshaping the form and content of a transnational and cultural interaction between the Arab World and the West? Do women writers articulate their concerns in the same manner across cultures? To what extent can literature cross borders and be fully engaged within diverse women’s concerns? And what might hinder the circulation of a transnational literary interaction?\n\tThese contemporary women writers have been studied in the belief that their novels are committed to a transnational feminist agenda. Both writers place their feminist concerns within a national framework that they constantly negotiate. However, this comparison to test the value of women’s writings across borders has been challenged by a more complex study of factors that intervene along the way. The politics of reception, the processes of production, circulation, and consumption of the writers’ literary texts, the writers’ own shifting allegiances moving from nationalism to broader multicultural, cosmopolitan and transnational frameworks, are all factors to be taken into account. These factors have a direct impact on the context through which the literary texts have to be studied. Hence, this study seeks to contribute to this task by showing how these writers are engaged in the process of adjusting, reconstructing and even transcending their cultural milieus.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".