The H(e)art of the Matter: Modernist Theatrical Liberalism in <i>Pal Joey</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, first- and second-generation American Jewish writers and composers working in popular entertainment largely resisted the modernist despair so fashionable among many of their contemporaries, choosing instead to devote themselves to an optimistic set of truths promised by American liberalism and expressed in the theatre. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, however, the lingering Great Depression, rising anti-Semitism, fascism, and the Second World War led to the hollowing out of many of the ideals of the immigrant generation and their children. A number of Jewish writers, many of whom had made their reputations defining and celebrating an ideology defined in this essay as theatrical liberalism, began to echo their modernist contemporaries. Just as modernist poets and novelists experimented with form in order to raise questions about truth, so modernist writers of popular plays and movies used the heavily formulaic nature of their genres to shock audiences into questioning the assumptions of theatrical liberalism upon which these popular forms relied. This essay explores how Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's 1940 musical Pal Joey uses the popular genre of the backstage musical to raise questions about the viability of theatrical liberalism in an era plagued by fascism, Nazism, and war.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.008 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".