Antigone “outsider” in Creon’s democracy: analysis of a contemporary reinterpretation of the Sophoclean myth1
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My paper analyzes four contemporary rewritings of Sophocles’s Antigone: the novel Home Fire (2017) by Kamila Shamsie, the Canadian film Antigone (2019) by Sophie Deraspe, and two British dramas: Aaliyah (After Antigone) (2021) by Kamal Kaan and Antigone (2022) by Inua Ellams. These works present an original vision of Antigone as an Islamic girl (Pakistani, Algerian or Bangladeshi) whose family has emigrated to a Western democracy (Britain or Canada). In this reinterpretation as a foreigner, Antigone takes on traits traditionally typical of Medea. Although Antigone is well socially integrated, the situation of one or both of her brothers (terrorism, delinquency or political opposition) leads her to reveal the condition of racism, intolerance and marginalization faced by minorities in a theoretically democratic, libertarian and inclusive country. At the same time, the characterization of Creon also undergoes a profound change, compared in particular to the Brechtian interpretation: he (or she, in Kamal Kaan’s drama) is not a violent dictator, or a politician who came to power in an exceptional situation, but a legitimate leading exponent of a democratic Western government, who (except in Deraspe’s film) shares the same foreign origins as Antigone’s family, but precisely for this reason must be even tougher in order not to lose the consensus acquired among the nation he governs, a consensus obtained also by denying part of his/her own native culture and satisfying the people’s need for order and security. This new interpretation thus allows the myth of Antigone to be used as a very current tool for social denunciation, not only of the failed integration of minorities in the great Western democracies, but of other problematic aspects of contemporary “civilized” countries, such as the populist tendencies of politics or the use of (social)media, through which, for example, the choruses are rendered in some rewritings.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".