Impossible Representation: Edward Albee and the End of Liberal Tragedy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Modern Tragedy, Raymond Williams expounds on the democratization of the tragic hero and the emergence of a literary formula that focused exclusively on the moral or ethical predicaments of the individual, whose private, quasi-transcendental suffering gained prestige in works by Henrik Ibsen and Arthur Miller. This essay argues that Edward Albee's 2002 play The Goat; or Who is Sylvia? poses a challenge to this liberal formula for tragic theatre and critiques the predominant paradigm of American political life that it embodies. As a dramatic experiment that documents the rupture of the fabric of a family, The Goat tests the limits of generic accommodation, powerfully connecting the event of genre renovation to political regeneration. Albee's deliberations on perversion and hysteria, comic seriousness, and political self-knowledge call into question the legitimacy of liberal contractarianism, illustrating how liberalism is, itself, experienced as contingent and deeply inadequate.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".