The Historical Edge of Irony: <i>Marco Millions</i> and Its Chinese Adaptations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT: This article historicizes the playtext(s) of Eugene O’Neill’s Marco Millions (1927) as a satire on America and contextualizes its adaptations in semi-colonial and “postcolonial” China, to examine how irony functions across time and across cultures. In the first part, I investigate the play’s poetic resistance to American Orientalism and its ironic failure to transcend the Eurocentric discourse it criticizes. In the second part, I examine the play’s trajectory on the Chinese stage from 1929 to 2009, arguing that these adaptations, as transideological, “postcolonial” irony, embodied the polyphony of Chinese Occidentalism and wrote back to the divided self of modern China. The ironic Marco Millions and its Chinese adaptations provoke the audience to rethink history and rewrite reality, also providing a site for critics to reconceive the complementary relationship between Orientalism and Occidentalism. Thus, this minor O’Neill play of the 1920s has acquired historical significance and contemporary relevance.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 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".