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 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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".