Postmodern Historiography in Suicide in B-Flat: Sam Shepard’s Myth of the Artist
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sam Shepard is one of the most popular postmodern playwrights. His plays have a mythic quality; they figure characters in search of their identities in their past. “Myth of the artist” is highlighted in many of his plays concerned with art. In Suicide in B-Flat --a postmodern play with surrealist techniques-- Shepard focuses on the new forms of art—pop art-- namely jazz music. He demythifies the past myth of the “artist” as “originator” and remythifies it as a confused figure in search of a true identity. Sam Shepard’s plays are historiographic in that they deal with the past representations and the ex-centric, marginal figures; they are parodic and have a critical attitude towards the past. Apart from the critical aspects, some of his plays are marked with the nostalgia of the American dream which is a popular theme in contemporary American drama. This article addresses the historiographic quality of Shepard’s Suicide in B-Flat, with emphasis on Linda Hutcheon's poetics of postmodern historiography and Roland Barth’s conception of modern myths in relation to patterns of culture. The aim is to show how the ex-centric pop cultural icons become central in postmodern historiography and how the old myths of hero turn into myths of anti-hero. The parodic aspect of the play, it is argued, poses a critical stance vis-a-vis the past representations of the myths and the elitist approach of modernist art. Key words: Sam Shepard; Suicide in B-Flat; Historiography; Myth of the Artist; The Postmodern
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".