Bibliographic record
Abstract
According to Elinor Fuchs, the main characteristic of postmodern theatre and, consequently, the main reason for the decline of the dramatic text as the most important element of classical theatre is the death of character. While the traditional Hegelian view of drama depends heavily on a unified fictional subject, Fuchs argues that both modern and postmodern theatre destabilise and subvert this subject to the degree that we can no longer see it as a coherent whole. Yet, her theory, like Hans-Thies Lehmann’s, has one notable methodological weakness: she almost entirely ignores comedy. Her study omits in its analysis a substantial portion of the repertoire not only of the mainstream but also of fringe and experimental theatres. This paper attempts to rectify this omission and hopes to determine whether character also disappears from postdramatic comedy and not just from serious postdramatic theatre. The analysis focuses on three forms of postmodern comedy that deviate from the traditional narrative format and seem to support Fuchs’s reading: on sketch, stand-up and improvisational comedy. Using examples from sketch comedy Beyond the Fringe, George Carlin’s stand-up acts and The Second City improvs, the main body of the argument tests the cogency of the basic tenets of Fuchs’s theory. The second part of the paper offers a counterargument and a possible supplement to her hypothesis.
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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".