“A Theatre of the Head”: Material Culture, Severed Heads, and the Late Drama of W.B. Yeats
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Floating (sometimes literally) throughout W.B. Yeats’s body of work is the severed human head that sings after death, an entity embodying the dynamic relationship between subject and object, being and non-being. The article traces the evolution of Yeats’s relationship to the severed head as symbol and prop to understand his ambivalence toward the object world of the stage. The symbolic severed heads of his early writing, such as the one found in The Green Helmet (1910), confirm his antipathy toward the material. However, three of his late plays feature severed heads as physical objects onstage. The King of the Great Clock Tower (1934), A Full Moon in March (1935), and The Death of Cuchulain (1939) all suggest that the unsettled and ambiguous prop of the severed head gave Yeats a unique tool to secure a human legacy and thus inspired him to recalibrate his relationship to the material world.
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 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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".