Looking for the One Who Looks Like Some One: The Unmarked Subject(s) in Gertrude Stein's <i>A Play Called Not and Now</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay focuses on Gertrude Stein's 1936 work A Play Called Not and Now, often regarded as Stein's most virulent attack on the theatre and the theatre's corruption of selves into simulacra, “entity” into “identity.” But if the play articulates Stein's discomfort with how her rising literary fame complicated her expressions of entity, it also offers a solution to this discomfort within the very theatrical conventions it appears to critique. Employing the methodology of performance studies, which regards performance as a unique medium that, in the words of Peggy Phelan, “becomes itself through disappearance,” this essay locates the centre of the play in its verbs rather than in its nouns and in the authorial presence it refuses to describe rather than in the celebrities it names. The essay begins with a detailed analysis of Stein's repetition of the verb “to look” throughout the play in order to re-examine the often debated question of what Stein meant when she called a work a play.
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.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".