Daniel, Drew. Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drew Daniel takes his title from the death scene in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra in which Cleopatra takes her own life, a scene he examines with care, in which the Clown says to her: "I wish you all joy of the worm" (81).Daniel explores suicide and pleasure in this intriguing book, which takes its cue in style and content from a typology of past and present, reading the ending of self and the possible pleasure therein in the early modern period through ancient, modern, and current literature, culture, and theory.How one reads or interprets Daniel's book depends, in part, on how much, as Roland Barthes might say, one reads with or against the grain of the text.More generally, drawing on intellectual and literary history, Daniel explores how voluntary death-distinguishing between suicide and self-killingin literature goes beyond tragedy.In this study, Daniel discusses the aesthetic of the "joy of the worm, " taking Cleopatra's embrace of the deadly asp as its image-a pattern of the representation of voluntary death as possible pleasure, comic, humorous, joyful, celebratory, mirthful, ecstatic, and much more, despite the denunciation, resistance, disgust, and punishment in response to taking one's own life.A positive aspect of Daniel's book is the close reading of scenes and passages from literature published between 1534 and 1713 and its presenting of a nuanced and intricate sense of this subject.For instance, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and Addison can portray death not simply as sickness or sin but also as something positive and heroic in nature, sex, and politics.Daniel appeals to a scholarly audience but also one familiar with the age of social media platforms and smartphones.He also discusses a world that the Marquis de Sade and Sigmund Freud might have recognized as well as the matter of community, love, and belonging.The use of troll and trolling is something that gestures to the typology of past and present, as the noun "troll" comes from the Old Norse "troll" and has long been used as a verb in English."Troll" has moved from supernatural giants to a use that has many dimensions, including being used on the Internet.A window into Daniel's typology is his treatment of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Timon as trolls: "A ubiquitous pejorative commonplace, 'troll' denotes both an antagonistic online persona and
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".