The Circle Game: Gender, Time, and “Revolution” in Tom Stoppard’s <i>The Coast of Utopia</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
These words sound a rather surprising note when the ill-fated Natalie Herzen speaks them in the opening moments of Shipwreck, the second play in Tom Stoppard’s 2002 trilogy The Coast of Utopia. After all, as members of the nineteenth- century Russian intelligentsia, Stoppard’s main characters are men committed to social change. At the end of the trilogy’s final play, Alexander Herzen sums up the meaning of their quest by maintaining that “history has no culmination! There is always as much in front as behind […] We need wit and courage to make our way while our way is making us. But that is our dignity as human beings” (Stoppard, Salvage 118). Natalie’s earlier question stands in stark contrast to this vision: while Herzen sees human existence as dominated by the struggle to advance through history, his wife sees it as haunted by cycles of repetition in which “certain moments […] keep having their turn again.”
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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".