“Some Exceptions” and the “Normal Thing”: Reconsidering <i>Waiting for Godot</i>'s Theatrical Form through Its Prison Performances
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot has long been read as a timeless and existential allegory portraying human fallibilities with which all viewers can identify. Building on recent scholarship that challenges such interpretations, this article demonstrates the particular manner in which Beckett's theatrical form, by turning around the relationship between the exception and the norm, articulates and responds to a modern form of incarceration. The article argues that Waiting for Godot explores the exceptional logic of detention by manipulating the relationship between spectators and performers in the theatre. An analysis of the play's prison performances further illuminates its performative dimensions and deepens an understanding of how it grapples with modern forms of detention. The final pages outline the implications of this reading for Beckett's larger oeuvre and argue that his “carceral theatricality” marks a significant development in modern drama.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 it