Shepard’s Political Economy: <i>Curse of the Starving Class</i> in Neoliberal Capitalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Through a close reading of Sam Shepard’ Curse of the Starving Class (1977), this article examines how the playwright’ work responded to the neoliberal economy as it began to deform and reorganize the lives of working Americans in the 1960s and 1970s by figuring neoliberalism as a nihilistic form of capitalism that cannot be adequately depicted via dramatic realism. Drawing inspiration from the work of Samuel Beckett, Curse engages neoliberalism through three formal devices: ceremonial monologues, objects that appear to magically proliferate, and elements of sacrifice – a lamb, fattened for slaughter. These three motifs are shown to subvert the causal logic of normative dramatic narrative to depict instead the new mode of neoliberal capitalism in which competition destroys familial bonds, creating only isolated individuals. It is precisely by integrating such Beckettian techniques within a realist envelope that Shepard made his family plays into a formidable demonstration of what it means to live within late industrial capitalism.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".