“Drowned in Rabelaisian Laughter”: Germans as Grotesque Comic Figures in the Plays of Tennessee Williams
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT: By the time he wrote The Night of the Iguana, in 1961, Tennessee Williams was increasingly favouring “fantastic” modes of presenting reality, relying on the more expressionistic and “plastic” kind of theatre that he had called for, as early as 1944, in his production notes to The Glass Menagerie. Williams’s interest in the fantastic modes of representation characteristic of German expressionism, in particular, along with his exaggerated, grotesque, and dream-like portrayal of Germans as symbolic characters in Iguana and several plays that would follow, shows that he was beginning to engage more fully a German sensibility that he would continue to develop in his later work. In The Gnädiges Fräulein (1966), A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (1979), and Kirche, Küche, Kinder (1979), for example, Germans also function as grotesque comic figures: perverse, darkly humorous, excessive, and bawdy. The German characters in Williams’s plays are inspired by an aesthetic rooted in the traditions of German expressionism and Romanticism that influenced his writing, as he fused these styles with related sensibilities – the carnivalesque, the grotesque, camp – that are associated with the resistance and rebellion typical of his late plays.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".