Presentism, Anachronism and the Case of<i>Titus Andronicus</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Today Shakespeare studies is exploring alternatives to an exhausted new historicism, and critical presentism is one of the new tendencies being explored. But presentism itself is a pluralistic endeavour, and this article pursues one possible path within it and one that speaks to one of the major criticisms made in reaction to early presentism: its supposed ignoring of history. But presentist criticism investigating how our present shapes our views of history has already been developed and can help rescue the field from an overly positivist approach to mere historical “facts” through its value-conscious engagement with the past. Here we focus on such a reading of “Titus Andronicus,” a play which fully expresses its historical moment of composition in the early 1590s. But today, the play in addition speaks to us of our own twenty-first century experience of terrorism. This approach can be seen as anachronistic, but it is an anachronism that opens up the play to its full meanings as a work of art in the twenty-first century. The use of anachronism in the context of consciousness of historical consciousness creates a form of presentist criticism which this article exemplifies. Indeed, recent historicist criticism of the play is already influenced by the new interest in Islamic cultures characteristic of the West since the events of Sept. 11, 2001, illustrating the sense in which historicist criticism itself has an important presentist dimension. In this reading, the play's own anachronisms—most prominently the Moorish character Aaron placed in Roman late antiquity—signals both the anxiety of Elizabethan audiences towards the Ottoman Empire and our own day's fear of terrorism from the Middle East.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".