"To please his mother": A Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Characterization in Coriolanus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“The fundamental point of psychoanalysis is that desire is not something given in advance,” writes Slavoj Žižek, “but something that has to be constructed.” Zach Ackerson’s sophisticated reading of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus employs Freudian and Lacanian vocabulary, testifying to the vitality of “critical psychoanalytic re-evaluations” (to borrow Ackerson’s precise classification). It also invites a possible rewording of Žižek’s formulation, one that substitutes “close reading” for “psychoanalysis” and “critical understanding” for “desire.” Constructing his argument out of the relative lack of scholarly attention to the title character’s paternal side, Ackerson animates the play’s Oedipal theme. What emerges from his analysis is a Coriolanus whose tragedy can be traced to an “intricate and distorted Oedipus complex.” This succinct and well-substantiated characterization satisfies the desire of any theory that aspires to be considered critical—it cannot be taken for granted in subsequent encounters with the text. —Geordie Miller
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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".