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Record W1989038701 · doi:10.3138/md.43.1.13

Postmodernism and Violence in Mamet's <i>Oleanna</i>

2000· article· en· W1989038701 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Thomas Porter

Bibliographic record

VenueModern Drama · 2000
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicCultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPostmodernismIdeologyPersonaPower (physics)BlameSociologyHarassmentWitchPsychoanalysisIronyHEROAestheticsCriminologyLiteraturePsychologyArtLawSocial psychologyPoliticsPolitical scienceHumanities

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Among the many surprises in David Mamet's controversial play Oleanna, the most shocking is perhaps the professor's violent attack on his student. This sudden eruption is certainly climactic; the problems it raises, however, seem to leave the audience to "draw its own conclusions," to take sides with either the professor or the student. Either option turns the play into melodrama, with the professor as hero/victim and the student as villain or the student as feminist heroine and the professor as villain/oppressor. Critical opinion is divided, with a majority of critics and reviewers, even those with feminist credentials, seeing the student as "bitch/witch," representative of a radical and punitive feminist ideology run rampant. Following Mamet's lead, other critics have suggested that sexual harassment is a vehicle for a broader issue: that Oleanna is a play about "power," or a "tutorial" play with a genre affinity to Ibsen's social-problem dramas. Most recently, Thomas Goggans attempts to exculpate the Carol persona by pointing to textual suggestions of child abuse in her past. Then, in passing, he attaches blame for her actions to manipulation by her feminist support "Group." This effort to redeem her effectively nominates this shadowy collective as the "real" villain. A final option, suggested by John Simon, is to finger the playwright — according to him, the play is simply a jumble, seriously flawed in concept and/or execution.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.011
Threshold uncertainty score0.035

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0110.015
Scholarly communication0.0070.003
Open science0.0010.004
Research integrity0.0020.004
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.033
GPT teacher head0.266
Teacher spread0.233 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations7
Published2000
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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