The Reading Room

12:03 AM

And another classic:

> The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

BESW

@Randal'Thor That'd be "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes. Excellently covered by Loreena McKennitt.

Rand al'Thor

Gotta love an anapestic tetrameter.

@BESW Yeah, I found the name by Googling, but those lines are still all I remember.

BESW

McKennitt's song helps with that. [grin]

Librarian

2

Q: Are questions about author's personal opinions on-topic?

I recently asked the question What is C. S. Lewis' opinion about homosexuality?. The question was closed as being off-topic. Are questions about authors' personal opinions on-topic or off-topic?

Bookworm

12:53 AM

0

Q: Story ID: Brother and sister go back to colonial times

This was a Scholastic-type book, probably about 5th-grade level. I would have read it in the 1980s. I remember there were a brother and sister, possibly in upstate New York. They either found or fell into a cave, inside of which were hazelnuts. They ate? the nuts, and this transported them back...

story-identification

Rand al'Thor

1:30 AM

@Hamlet This is an interesting one. It's asking about an interpretation of a text which was explicitly denied by the author (so there'll be no "authorial intent" answers here) but which is/was still held by a lot of readers.

BESW

> "I write at the same degree of excellence that I wrote in the 60s," [Buffy] Sainte-Marie says. [...] "It really surprised people in the '60s. They asked 'How can you be so young and write with such wisdom?' Now, they ask 'How can you be the age you are and write with such freshness?'"

(from Indian Country Media Network's 2015 article about her new album)

Bookworm

2:21 AM

1

Q: What justifies the anti-Tess interpretation of "Tess of the d'Urbervilles"?

Upon its publication, Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles inspired much debate as to whether Tess should be perceived as an innocent young woman thrust too early into the cruel world of men or as a shameless young hussy who deserved everything she got. The author claimed to be surprise...

thomas-hardy tess-of-the-durbervilles

Hamlet

3:51 AM

That was pretty cool. I asked a question on Stack Overflow, and got an answer in minutes

Bookworm

4:30 AM

0

Q: What is the significance of the magicians in the poem 'In The Bazaars Of Hyderabad'

In the poem 'In The Bazaars Of Hyderabad',we can see the poet telling- "'What do you chant,o ye' magicians, Spells for aeons to come. "- Here aeons likely refers to eternal ages and the magicians are likely chanting such spells for the eternity of their visitors. But I can't understand the si...

poetry

Bookworm

5:22 AM

0

Q: What is close reading?

I've heard the phrase "close reading" thrown around in this site's chat room. What exactly is "close reading"? How does it relate to the study of literature? Is it hard to do?

close-reading

user61230

5:50 AM

user61230

What a pleasant set of numbers. I feel like this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

user61230

7:15 AM

It's time for another Midnight Meta Ramble!

user61230

C'monnnn, Librarian, you can do it...

Mithrandir

8:14 AM

@Hamlet that's what SO does :P I had that too, for my single question (I don't code, but I felt like participating in the Google Code-in for some reason.)

user61230

9:06 AM

@Librarian You have let me down :[

BESW

@Emrakul On the plus side, that means it didn't RickRoll you.

user61230

That's always a plus.

Standback

@BESW I generally don't have any issue with "trivially bypassable", on the grounds that as long as the trivial bypass is also blatantly obvious, the question will probably be downvoted.

BESW

@Standback And yet, in this case... it's something we're seeing regularly and folks are debating.

Because a lot of the querents aren't trying to pull a fast one.

Just like on RPG.SE nobody was trying to get away with anything by asking about telephones in the 1920s.

Librarian

4

Q: Should we require questions to contextualize why they were asked?

Lately, I've been thinking about a common thread between questions that seem to be an... issue on Literature. We've gotten a lot of questions that have been downvoted, and sometimes closed, sometimes not - and they all seem to share a common attribute: a lack of an explanation for why they were a...

discussion question-quality

user61230

9:20 AM

It lives! Mwahahaha!

Standback

@BESW Do you feel what we're seeing regularly is people asking about something off-topic (e.g. Tolkein's sandwich preferences), or people attempting to bypass the off-topic-ness?

(Sincere question. As usual :P )

BESW

I think it's mostly sincere attempts to think of lit questions, pushed a little too far (our authorial focus inherited from SFF makes an author's sandwich preferences seem plausibly topical); or stuff that's genuinely about literature but not necessarily in a way lit.se can handle.

But that's muddied by a number of questions whose sole purpose is to provoke conversation about topicality.

3

Questions designed to force a conversation tend to fall apart for other reasons because they're prompted by reasoning that actual questions the conversation SHOULD be about won't have.

4

That makes it harder to talk about the stuff that's sincerely asked for the sake of the answer.

Bookworm

10:28 AM

0

Q: Help me identify a story about a boy who flees to an island with his friends.

So, this one story (novel) I read as a child. It was a around 250-400 page book with medium text size (and sketches on one every left page (almost). I only remember fragments of it. If anyone could help me identify it, This boy uses a boat to flee to an island not far away from his house which s...

story-identification

Napoleon Wilson

12:09 PM

@Librarian Woot! Awesome! I've long been an advocate of motivating your question properly. If people think it's trivial or stupid, tell them why it's not!

Martin Ender

12:51 PM

@muru I thought the consensus was not to use tags for individual works? (unless they're super popular and spawn tons of questions)

muru

@MartinEnder huh, I recall someone telling me that it was undecided yet.. I suppose I'll remove that tag (you're talking of the David Mitchell post, right)

b_jonas

Oh dear. By now people have proposed so many ideas about what shouldn't be on topic on Lit, that if we applied all of them, barely any question could be posted.

@Randal'Thor Yeah, googling often helps for popular poems.

@Randal'Thor Ah man, The Raven is so popular with everyone. I can sort of understand it.

@BESW Lol.

@Randal'Thor What? No way. There must be a lot of spam questions hard-deleted in that sense.

(That is, if you define "hard-deleted" as not visible to ordinary high reputation users.)

@BESW Ah, so as a schoolchild you get away with anything if you say "it's for a project" like Terry Pratchett suggests, or as an adult if you wear a lab coat and say "it's for Science"?

FuzzyBoots

1:09 PM

@b_jonas ^_^ Or how pornography can be justified by artists by saying that they're finding pose references.

Martin Ender

@muru I'm personally in favour of the tags, but I think this consensus is reasonably clear? meta.literature.stackexchange.com/q/362/298

b_jonas

@BESW Usually no, because that encourages really bad homework questions. The worst example of that is hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Tudakoz%C3%B3/…

Besides, it's usually about books that are recommended reading in many schools, and so there are already a lot of good summaries available for schoolchildren.

Martin Ender

@anuvaramban Stufen by Hermann Hesse (Steps or Stages in English translations although so far, I haven't found one that fully captures the nuances of the German original)

(...which is likely impossible to do)

FuzzyBoots

@b_jonas Aw man... and I remember asking a fanfiction list back in the day if anyone had summaries of the later Ranma 1/2 volumes because I only had access to the first few and I figured that, with so many stories rewriting the starting chapters, someone was bound to have rewritten the rest of it.

b_jonas

@BESW This, yes. We don't need to have the whole site topic defined by a single word.

muru

1:13 PM

@MartinEnder indeed, it is. Edit rolled back

FuzzyBoots

Indeed. We need to define what it is we really want. As it is, I'm reminded of Humpty Dumpty in *Alice in Wonderland*.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”

b_jonas

We can have a meaningful site whose topic can't be summarized in just four snappy words for a title. As an example, a few weeks ago we had a photo contest for arthropods other than insects. I suggested the topic. But if we wanted an SE site for that, "Arthropods other than insects SE" would be a bad title. We'd call it "Spiders and crustaceans SE", even if centipedes are on topic but aren't covered by that title.

or more likely "Spiders & Crustaceans SE" given how names for existing SE sites work.

Standback

2:36 PM

@Emrakul , can I ask a question about your Meta post?

There's something about it that's very unclear to me.

anuvaramban

@MartinEnder I don't doubt it! thanks for the share (i'll have to make do with the English one i'm afraid)

Standback

I'm in great agreement with your motivation, but I'm not sure I understand your proposal.

Just to take a couple of (excellent) questions of yours as examples --

Where did the idea of "true names" come from: https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1724/where-did-the-idea-of-a-true-name-come-from
Asexuality in Ancient Greek writings: https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1344/are-there-recorded-instances-of-asexuality-in-the-body-of-ancient-greek-writings
What prompted Orwell to write 1984: https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/938/do-we-know-what-prompted-orwell-to-write-1984

Would you describe them as explaining "motivational context"? Or not?

I'm asking because I feel like each of them defines its question very clearly, but I'm not sure if that's the same thing as "explaining why you're asking this question."

Hamlet

5:32 PM

@Standback I'm planning on writing a close reading answer sometime soon (unless @BESW doesn't write one first) that should explain things

Bookworm

-1

Q: Story-ID Teenager in Orphanage

I am looking for a story that was part of a Reader's Digest anthology. I read in the very early 1990s as a German translation, but I am pretty sure, the story is from the USA (and was probably written in the 1980s). I remember neither title nor author of the story, but this is a synopsis: The s...

story-identification

Standback

5:57 PM

@Hamlet Great. I can self-delete, and undelete later if I want to salvage something, right?

user61230

6:35 PM

Hey, @Standback! I might be popping in and out a bit, forewarning

Standback

@Emrakul That's perfectly fine, and to be expected.

I literally wrote the question and popped out,

and the same goes for this snippet of a chat comment :-)

user61230

Okey-doke! :]

user61230

I would say that the Orwell question (which I just happened to open first) does explain the context. I was reading What is Fascism?, which led me to wonder if 1984 was a continuation in the same vein. From the comments and snippet of an answer, I'd say this did help, at least a little.

user61230

The Greek question, looks like it was a little less clearly contextualized, but I do still explain why I'm asking, and use the source content I was reading to draw a couple examples that more clearly elucidate the question I was asking. I think if I'd left it as just "did Greeks recognize asexuality?" and nothing more, it would have been missing context and have been open to miscommunication/misinterpretation.

user61230

But, it's true that, in general, there may be some questions that wouldn't be improved by adding context. I also wouldn't necessarily expect those to be closed, unless people felt that the close process posed some real benefit. I'm leaving things a little vague so we have some more wiggle room going forward.

user61230

6:48 PM

(Part of that vagueness/wiggle room concerns what counts as context and explanation, and what counts as "enough." Since the goal is to help people write better questions, it seems like something that should be learned over time rather than be demarcated from the outset.)

b_jonas

7:13 PM

Ah nice! Apparently Arany János was born 200 years ago today, so there are some anniversary events.

Riker

7:37 PM

ok, who serial upvoted me

I just got 70 rep

from old, not bumped questions and answers

Himarm

shall i sprinkle some downvotes for you?

Riker

7:56 PM

nah I'm good

BESW

8:16 PM

....I want to ask about Tolkien Truthers, but I don't think that'd be on topic.

2

Riker

?

BESW

Apparently there are people who look for evidence that Middle-Earth really IS a previous epoch of Earth's history.

Hamlet

9:38 PM

@BESW if all the other stuff we get is on-topic, Tolkien Truthers are definitely on-topic

3

Hamlet

9:56 PM

@Emrakul I think you need to have a clear definition of what you mean by context

I would personally define context as "this helps me understand literature because___" Of course, it's going to be hard to come to a consensus about what is an acceptable context

@Standback FYI if you want to modify your answer about close reading, here's what it is:

Close reading involves taking a passage (usually no longer than one paragraph) and going through that paragraph word by word and sentence by sentence

When you do this, you get a sense of every possible meaning that passage communicates.

You then write up your observations. That's what a close reading is.

You don't use outside sources, and you aren't going in with a specific question in mind. You're just trying to discover all possible meanings of the passage

It's the foundation of all literary analysis. It's the first thing any good undergraduate program will teach

Standback

@Emrakul So, I'm gonna be super brief, but: none of those feel to me like necessary motivation. They're great questions because the question is clear and well defined. But basically always, the motivation is "I was wondering." Which, well, leaves me a little confused about your meta post.

@Hamlet Ok. A) Thank you! B) I have seen the phrase used absolutely differently than what you're describing.

Hamlet

@Standback where?

Standback

@Hamlet Abigail Nussbaum, a reviewer I'm very fond of, has used it on multiple occasions to describe somebody else's review of something. That's where I'm familiar with the term from.

I feel like I've heard it around in general. shrug

Hamlet

@Standback she probably was referring to the conclusions of the close reading, not the process

Or maybe she just is using it incorrectly

I would give a bounty to an answer that also gave an example of how to do a close reading on a passage from literature, FYI (if that example was original and not copied from another website

Standback

@Hamlet ...The Harvard article I pointed out didn't seem to me like what you're describing.

OTOH i skimmed after the opening.

might there be multiple definitions?

Hamlet

10:06 PM

@Standback (1) the harvard article isn't the best article, here are some better ones taxicrash.github.io/2017/01/24/literary-analysis-examples

But also, if you look at the actuall process the Harvard article describes (and not just the summary), you'll see that it's describing exactly what I'm describing

Standback

Maybe the difference is whether you're referring to the process or the result.

Anyway, can't stay ATM. But again, thank you :-)

Hamlet

@Standback well, the result of a close reading isn't special or different from the result of any other kind of analysis

It's the process that makes close reading close reading

Mithrandir

@Riker I got a couple too.

user61230

@Standback Ultimately, this is a basic motivation for all questions asked here. While it's true that "I was curious" is a motivation for what I was asking, that's only incidental to the fact that I was reading something that led me to ask a question pertaining to it.

user61230

@Hamlet I'll think about this. I don't think it's something that can be so clearly delineated, but maybe it's worth clarifying at least a little.

Standback

10:17 PM

@Hamlet Hmmm. You're saying the process of line-by-line annotation is a close reading, and reading the story less-closely, annotating only what catches your interest and seems significant, is not? Interesting.

I might have follow-up questions, then :-)

@Emrakul You're saying you'd like questions to stem from the books, to be motivated by them, rather than merely being about the books?

user61230

@Standback Not... quite? I'm saying that there's a common problem to a lot of questions, which is that "why did you ask this?" is something that seems to be missing.

user61230

Maybe it's true that I need to think more about it.

BESW

10:32 PM

@Standback I'm gonna agree with Hamlet here. I've seen close reading applied to more text than a single paragraph, but it's always about paying really close attention to everything you're reading and how it fits together.

A major quality of close reading is whether any of the text disagrees with your interpretation. You can't do that by cherry-picking the interesting bits.

Hamlet

10:47 PM

@Standback exactly.

BESW

For example, the Lipstick and Nylons reading of Susan is not close reading because it ignores how everything around the lipstick and nylons line changes the significance and weight of that particular line.

Hamlet

The harvard page about close reading is incorrect when it says "Your aim may be to notice all striking features of the text, including rhetorical features, structural elements, cultural references; or, your aim may be to notice only selected features of the text—for instance, oppositions and correspondences, or particular historical references"

Bookworm

11:07 PM

1

Are there any other very popular books with short indexed passages like the bible?

the-bible

Rand al'Thor

11:58 PM

@b_jonas No, spam posts are still visible to 10k+ rep users by viewing the revision history.

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