<i>Oleanna </i>and <i>The Children's Hour: </i>Misreading Sexuality on the Post/Modern Realistic Stage
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour (1934) and David Mamet's Oleanna (1992) confront similar problems: both deal with difficult-to-verify sexual accusations, and both were consequently banned or protested when first staged. Both are written by Jewish playwrights who moved easily back and forth between stage and film and who directed their own productions. Both are set in schools, but the line between home and school is blurred; both deal with female students and with accusations against teachers; both deal with sexual accusations, which by definition are murky and matters of perception. Yet both employ the conventions of realism, which require that the hidden secrets be revealed by the end of the play. So, from the outset, the clarity of the realistic form is potentially at odds with the sexually ambivalent content. As a result, critical response is deeply divided over these plays, producing particularly vituperative attacks on both playwrights. More importantly, however, the two playwrights are deeply linked by the common approach of attacking the objectivity of the audiences who make judgments on their plays. Both problematize the possibility of making objective judgments and thereby question the very foundation of the realistic conventions that they seem to espouse.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".