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.
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 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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".