"getting it straight": Ambivalent Misalignment and the Kinship Idiom in the Drama of Sharon Pollock
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study explores Canadian playwright Sharon Pollock's work under the conceptual and formal framework of what I call "ambivalent misalignment" and "the kinship idiom:" the former in terms of relationships between individuals and groups, and as a characteristic dramatic form; and the latter, as both the context within which misalignments are manifest and as an idiom through which Pollock's characters and communities articulate their experiences.Scholars have described Pollock as a "playwright of conscience," emphasising the content and instrumental nature of her work.My focus is on Pollock as artist and the forms and techniques she uses to convey her ideas and meanings.I argue that ambivalent misalignment and the kinship idiom form a cohesive framework which makes visible neglected formal, emotional, ethical, and thematic elements in Pollock's work.ii My work is informed by the theoretical observations of Susan Letzler Cole, on tragic drama and mourning rituals; Bennett Simon, on familial conflict in tragedy and its structural representation; Carol Gilligan, on relational psychology and the justice and care orientations in ethical decision making; and finally, Günther Anders, on the importance of imagination and feeling for ethical action.Chapter two explores Pollock's representations of the literal and metaphoric family and recurring issues such as identity, self-knowledge, the self-in-relation, and the ambivalent difficulties of belonging.Chapter three focuses on familial loss and mourning and related concerns such as one's relation to the past.I also discuss formal elements of the mourning ritual in Pollock's work, including the liminal, the mourner-inheritor, the beloved deceased, and ambivalence.Chapter four considers stories about relations and relational stories, and how storytelling functions as strategic performance, a way of being in relationship, and a means of selfreflection.I argue that misalignment is a necessary and positive condition for ethical storytelling.Finally, chapter five examines Pollock's visions of desirable communities.I show how Pollock dramatises the ambivalent misalignment between the justice and care orientations in ethical decision making.I also demonstrate how kinship informs Pollock's ethical values and her use of the kinship idiom as a means to create an expansive moral imagination and affective response necessary for ethically responsible action.iii The completion of this study has been a long and fitful journey, with many stops and starts and detours along the way.It would not have been possible without the help and support of many many people over the years.In addition, my work in the early years was supported by the
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| 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".