Sympathy in Translation: Paul et Virginie on the London Stage1
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay explores the aesthetic boundaries of sympathy and spectatorship through James Cobb’s adaptation of Bernardin de Saint Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788, 1789) into a comic opera for the London stage (1800). The aesthetic reach of a story differs when it is experienced in a solitary encounter with the text on the page or a public performance of actors on the stage. The virtual spectatorship experienced in reading might invite the reader to other worlds and shape the public into a transnational community of sentiment. By contrast, theatre-goers are engaged in a different performance of fellow-feeling: much as they identify with the action on the stage, their identity is also shaped by being part of the public that comes together at the theatre, where performances take on local and national forms of collective identity. Comparing the virtual and actual forms of spectatorship posited by the French novel and the English comic opera, this essay explores how the medium of the book and the theatre construct different aesthetic communities and project different models of citizenship and colonial governance. As Cobb transposes the story from Mauritius to the West Indies, his adaptation of the plot offers an ameliorist model of slavery. Through its imagined community and its comedic ending Cobb explores the possibility that the metropolis and the colonies might be united in a creole nation within the empire.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 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) | 0.002 | 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