“The World Unwraps Itself”: Tracing Utopia in Gregory Maguire’s <i>Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West</i> and Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s <i>Wicked: The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fans and critics alike have frequently remarked on the tonal and narrative differences between Gregory Maguire’s complexly political 1995 Wizard of Oz reimagining Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West and Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s lighter 2003 Broadway adaptation Wicked: The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz. While these differences are undoubtedly present and are tied to questions of intended audience and media/genre norms, both versions find common ground in their engagement with the ideas and potentials of utopia. Thinking with Bloch, Muñoz, and Levitas, this article traces constructions of concrete and abstract utopia across these adaptations, ultimately suggesting that despite their differences in approach, each version serves to evoke, anticipate, and effect potential futures both within their narratives, and for their respective readers and audiences.
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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.090 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".