W.B. Yeats and the Delegated Voice: <i>The Words upon the Window-Pane</i> and <i>A Full Moon in March</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article uses the concept of phonography, defined as the representation of sonic events, to examine two of W.B. Yeats’s later plays, The Words upon the Window-Pane and A Full Moon in March. Each of these plays allegorizes its own genesis as a phonographic artwork, a sonic inscription designed to transmit the author’s voice. By asking whether text can serve as a conduit, they provide ample evidence of Yeats’s attachment to phonocentric thought. The Words anticipates Roland Barthes’s pronouncements on “the death of the author” by pessimistically deconstructing Yeats’s own phonocentric position. Its centrepiece is a corrupted séance that functions as a travesty of the play itself, enacting a mechanical medium through a spiritualist medium who seems to relay a recording of the voice of Jonathan Swift. While The Words registers a host of anxieties about mediation, social degeneration, and nullified authority, A Full Moon reconciles voice and inscription in the symbol of the singing severed head. This reconciliation is allegorized as a sacred marriage, a scripted ritual that involves an execution by beheading. The head’s song, which can be read as Yeats’s figure for the phonographic inscription, represents the magically immediate transmission of the poet’s voice to a posthumous audience.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".