The Sublime Actor and the Poetics of Emotions: Agency, Affect, and the Theatrical Sublime
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation traces the history of the theatrical sublime from classical, neoclassical, and British eighteenth-century texts and performances to identify the emergence of the sublime actor, a figure who demonstrates a crucial tension in affect theory and in understanding the individual subject. To theorize this figure, I develop what I call the poetics of emotions—an original approach to understanding affect and its representation, one that borrows from Aristotle’s theory of drama to argue that through the power of representation, attempts to delineate emotions necessarily flip into depictions and demonstrations of agency. If affect is the seat of our interiority, it is also universal, objective, and predictable, an effect, apropos Aristotle, of plot. In cognizing, representing, or performing them, our feelings can be summoned, manipulated, and contained. The sublime actor masters this process, turning helplessness into agency, and the emotional labour of this transformation models the ideal subject of emotional capitalism. I render this sublime actor visible by bringing theories from Aristotle, Longinus, Adam Smith, Denis Diderot, and Sir Henry Irving to bear on performances by Marie Champmeslé, Sarah Siddons, and John Kemble, in plays that focus on the myth of Phaedra by Euripides, Jean Racine, Joanna Baillie, and Eugene O’Neill. These plays are of significance not just because of their thematic interest in powerful emotions and their expression, but because they express these themes through a shared formal device, which I call the scene of inquiry. These scenes, I argue, create a space in the theatre to stage the sublime drama of the mind such that a poetics of emotions can readily emerge. By following the intertextual history of these scenes, this dissertation observes how the fiscal pressures of the commercial theatre twist the theatrical sublime into becoming an aesthetic of economic success and celebrity, one that culminates in the theatrical innovations of Baillie and the social and theatrical performances of Siddons.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".