The Recess Does Not Exist: Absorption, Literality, and Feminine Subjectivity in Sophia Lee’s <i>The Recess</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The structure of feminine subjectivity in Sophia Lee’s The Recess; Or, A Tale of Other Times (1783) is frequently reduced to a discursive construction or a maternal substance. When critical attention is focused on Lee’s unique handling of visual and textual “absorption”—a concept I borrow from Michael Fried—it is clear that historicist and Gothic logics of subjectivity fall short of describing what the novel actually achieves. I link Lee’s textual innovations to Jacques Lacan’s theories of the gaze and of feminine desire. Just as Lacan emphasized the literal aspect of the signifier, Lee attempts to literalize the historical and subjective dramas with which she engages in the novel. Her literalizations exceed the standard alignment of the feminine with non-meaning or nature (an alignment that supports the assumption of masculine meaningfulness) as Lee’s literality pertains to the letter itself. To be absorbed by the literal: it is this unique scenario that necessitates a rethinking of the basic problematic of sentimental reading practices in the eighteenth century.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".