The Reading Room

Bookworm

00:10

0

Q: Is there any deeper significance to Borges's "The South"?

"The South" is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges about a man, Dahlmann, who is injured by bashing his head against a window, but makes an almost miraculous recovery after a long stint in hospital. He heads out to the countryside in the hope of convalescence, but is unwillingly embroiled in a kni...

Rand al'Thor

00:23

Screenshot for posterity, since these comments surely have been or soon will be deleted:

BESW

00:47

This book looks interesting: Reading Native American Women: Critical/Creative Representations

Rand al'Thor

New Hot Network Question(s) detected:

8

Q: 227 days in Life of Pi, coincidence or symbolical?

I'm wondering whether it is known whether the 227 days in Life of Pi symbolical is for pi or that the symbolism I see (as a mathematician :)) is pure coincidence. I think that it is symbolic for pi because pi ~ 22/7, which is quite well-known.

symbolism life-of-pi yann-martel

BESW

(I'm poking through Goodreads. Have added about a thousand books to my account, still going strong.)

Rand al'Thor

I wonder if Native American culture would be a good place to look for questions about oral literature.

BESW

I wonder if this site could field the idea that this might not be oral history.

Rand al'Thor

@BESW Not having read that article in detail ... if it's not oral history, what is it?

BESW

00:54

It's a record of a moment in oral history.

Think about the differences between a clip from a film and the film, and between a novelisation of a film and the film.

The medium is the massage and tape recordings are not the medium of oral literature.

Napoleon Wilson

So...trying to record is a bad idea because recording destroys the concept of oral history?

BESW

No.

Recording oral history is not bad.

VicAche

Better dictate it than record it

BESW

Confusing a recording with the oral history it's a recording of--that'd be bad.

Just like House of Leaves encodes significant meaning in the experience of physically interacting with the book, oral history encodes significant meaning in the times and places it's told, who it's told by and to whom it is told.

Napoleon Wilson

@VicAche Or that.

BESW

00:59

Dictation to text is equally okay, but equally the resultant text is no longer oral literature.

Napoleon Wilson

@BESW But wouldn't confusing the actual oral account with what happened already expose that problem?

VicAche

I beg to disagree with the "exactly"

Napoleon Wilson

Afterall, everything that didn't happen now isn't now.

VicAche

I think you're confusing past and history

Let's call it recorded history...

BESW

This is an ongoing discussion amongst scholars from oral traditions, and there's no consensus on right or wrong practices.

Napoleon Wilson

01:01

@BESW I feel that is merely just disabling the practice of calling anything oral history, which...is a nice terminological twist, but doesn't seem to be more than that.

BESW

@NapoleonWilson I don't understand what you're trying to say in this, or your previous message to me.

Napoleon Wilson

Well, ditto, I guess. ;-)

BESW

(Also, please note, that oral history is a subset of oral literature and oral traditions.)

Napoleon Wilson

I'll just try to start anew then with: as soon as oral history derives its meaning from the way when and where it's told, then it isn't pure history anymore, whatever it is.

BESW

(What I'm saying is true of any message which contains significant oral-specific encoding.)

Napoleon Wilson

01:04

@BESW I guess that might be my mistake then. I'll rather crawl back under my rock. Sorry. ;-)

BESW

@NapoleonWilson Then what is history?

VicAche

So doesn't a recording of someone giving oral history containing significan oral-specific encoding?

Rand al'Thor

@NapoleonWilson History as in a completely factual account? Well, sure, but neither is written history, whatever some historians may pretend ;-)

Napoleon Wilson

@Randal'Thor Indeed.

BESW

@VicAche Yes, but only a small fraction of the encodings possible.

Napoleon Wilson

01:05

6 mins ago, by Napoleon Wilson

@BESW But wouldn't confusing the actual oral account with what happened already expose that problem?

VicAche

@BESW that's what's disagreed with in my answer on Odysseus

@BESW I don't see how that makes it less oral or less history

@BESW orality is about possibilities (I'm not saying speech, I'm saying orality. You can read out a speach many time, or you can write many versions of an oral history)

BESW

These are exactly the ideas that I'm not sure the site can currently field, but which discussions of oral literature need to have the vocabulary and context for.

These are the debates.

VicAche

Great demonstration then, well done!

However, do we need an agreement on this to ask and answer questions on (oral literature/replace by your educated troll subject of choice here)?

BESW

The conclusions will change between cultures and contexts, as Aboriginal oral traditions are very different from Alaskan Native oral traditions.

We don't need agreement on the subject matter; that would defeat the point of a Stack that can handle literary analysis.

It'd be nice to have the tools to talk about it from a position of knowledge.

There's a line to walk between "ask the questions and the experts will come" and "know what you're talking about or the experts will point and laugh and leave."

VicAche

So what's missing is just a "what are some tool for oral literature discussion?" question with great answers?

BESW

01:11

That'd be a good start.

VicAche

I think we have different cultures on this tho

BESW

Yup.

VicAche

My culture (not talking just about my character) would be: if somebody asks a question that you can answer, however imperfectly, answer it and wait for others to correct or add in

which mean that we have a high tendency to interfere in other's answers

but that no French scholar will be attracted by a website with no questions or no answers

BESW

There are other kinds of questions about oral traditions which the site might be better able to handle. Like, say, it might be very cool to compare indigenous and European records of horses in the Americas.

Rand al'Thor

2

Brb, editing this into all the meta posts about authorial intent.

BESW

01:17

And issues of Western intellectual property laws as they apply to traditions which are owned tribally (does Disney's Moana change who has legal rights to the stories of Māui?).

Heck, there's standing questions about whether the people who gave Disney those stories had the right to.

VicAche

BESW

Thing is, there's basically no Western court of law that would recognise tribal ownership of indigenous oral literature.

Various tribes are developing work-arounds, but none of them are satisfactory as it all requires re-defining tribal concepts of ownership to fit into the Western intellectual property mould.

Check out the legal struggles regarding pākehā use of the haka, for example.

VicAche

theguardian.com/world/2009/feb/12/new-zealand-haka-maoris

'hat?

BESW

That's one instance, yes.

VicAche

Traditional knowledge

The terms traditional knowledge (TK), indigenous knowledge (IK), and local knowledge generally refer to knowledge systems embedded in the cultural traditions of regional, indigenous, or local communities. Traditional knowledge includes types of knowledge about traditional technologies of subsistence (e.g. tools and techniques for hunting or agriculture), midwifery, ethnobotany and ecological knowledge, traditional medicine, celestial navigation, ethnoastronomy, the climate, and others. These kinds of knowledge, crucial for subsistence and survival, are generally based on accumulations of empirical...

@BESW isn't that contradicted by this?

BESW

01:30

There's... movement toward a better implementation of that concept.

But it's still a work in progress and is fundamentally applying Western ownership concepts to indigenous properties rather than recognising indigenous ownership concepts.

It's an epistemological contact zone.

(BTW, that haka article has the pākehā PM saying that he thinks the All Blacks should be allowed to use the haka without any changes in their arrangement because "they have had the rendition of Ka Mate for a long time." By which he means they stole it a hundred years ago.)

Generally speaking I'd suggest looking for indigenous perspectives on these issues. Magazines and newspapers like e-tangata, Indian Country Media Network, and even Colorlines are good places to start learning who's talking about themselves in ways that other indigenous people respect.

Wikipedia and Western newspapers, no matter how well-meaning they might be, just aren't going to be able to plumb the depth of these subjects. Wikipedia, for example, buries worldwide indigenous concerns about the flaws in prior art laws as a protection for traditional knowledge, in the last paragraphs of the section on Indian medicine. And the Guardian doesn't challenge or question the PM's assertions that stealing indigenous traditions should go unredressed if it happened long enough ago.

VicAche

01:57

Will read that with a fresh mind but thanks for the refreshing sources!

Rand al'Thor

02:57

New topic challenge suggestion:

0

A: Suggest your Lit.SE reading challenges here!

Topic challenge: Icelandic Sagas I think suggesting a single one would be too narrow a challenge to catch many people's interest, but Icelandic sagas as a whole definitely form an interesting (and influential) part of literature. I don't know too much about them, but some rudimentary research su...

Napoleon Wilson

Nice, I've read 1 or 2 of them.

That being said, thinking they're anything but romanticized and Christianized prose versions of whatever the original story was might be...naive.

Rand al'Thor

Well, the issue of how they've changed from the original stories to the written versions that survive today could make a good question in itself.

Napoleon Wilson

Well, sure. The points that make them relevant still apply, as do other points that make them culturally interesting. But putting too much emphasis on their alleged nature as "almost oral" tradition might be a stretch.

They sure can't compete with whatever truely indigenous oral traditions those things discussed earlier are.

Rand al'Thor

Edited slightly to put more emphasis on that difference.

BESW

I'd be interested to know if there are surviving Icelandic oral traditions.

Certainly Icelandic oral and written traditions co-existed and cross-pollinated for many centuries before the arrival of foreign folklorists.

Rand al'Thor

03:16

Iceland has a long and interesting history.

BESW

And I'm given to understand that waves of musical literacy influenced the saga traditions as well.

Rand al'Thor

They lay claim to the world's oldest parliament (the Althing).

They still use patronymic surnames.

Their alphabet has letters which are found in (AFAIK) no other alphabet in the world except phonetic ones.

BESW

I would be a little concerned that questions about the sagas might be more along the lines of "how do Icelandic sagas influence LotR?"

Such questions are obviously topical and appropriate, but I'd consider it one of the least interesting ways to engage with the texts.

Rand al'Thor

@BESW Edited again to stress that the topic challenge would be primarily about the sagas themselves and not other works influenced by them.

BESW

@Randal'Thor Studying cross-pollination between works can be interesting and useful when leveraged toward a particular purpose, but often it's instead used to bring the conversation back to the accepted canon and relegate the lesser known work to a mere satellite of Great Literature.

It's not a conscious thing, just a reflex action to stay safely inside the comfortable narrative.

Rand al'Thor

03:32

Well, much as I'm a fan of Tolkien and the fantasy genre in general, I did post this suggestion out of appreciation of the sagas themselves rather than just what they've influenced.

BESW

Aye.

It's a reflex we'll be likely to encounter with this challenge, just more obviously with something like the Sagas which can be so easily suborned to a work that's already popular with the users.

Gallifreyan

12:13

TIL there's a "Sandman's Pouch" in World of Warcraft

Bookworm

13:23

0

Q: What does "halter" mean here?

The following sentence occurs in Mark Twain's sketch Private History of a Campaign that Failed: The drenching we were getting was misery enough, but a deeper misery still was the reflection that the halter might end us before we were a day older. What is meant here by "halter"? Is an obscur...

mark-twain

Skooba

13:37

@Randal'Thor and there it is ^.^ literature.stackexchange.com/help/badges/44/electorate

Rand al'Thor

14:18

@Skooba Congrats!

That's the ... fourth? ... gold badge awarded so far on Lit.

Or sixth if you count meta.

Beastly Gerbil

Woah you got that fast

Rand al'Thor

@Bookworm @BeastlyGerbil Your answer is quite right, but I had to overperform and post another one :-P

Skooba

@Randal'Thor /file/run/ Happy Dance

Beastly Gerbil

@Randal'Thor hehe :P

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor "Their alphabet has letters which are found in (AFAIK) no other alphabet" Meh, you can say that about a lot of languages and writing systems.

Beastly Gerbil

14:21

Hope I helped on your own question too

Skooba

@BeastlyGerbil "got" = systematically achieved ;-)

Beastly Gerbil

Well done anyway! Best I've got is 'enlightened' :P

Rand al'Thor

@b_jonas Not many in western Europe.

@BeastlyGerbil Yes, the personal connection was interesting (upvoted your answer), but I'm still hoping for more.

Beastly Gerbil

I don't have time right now to research the rest of the story after the hospital, and plus I haven't actually read the story, but might try and expand later

Rand al'Thor

@BeastlyGerbil It's only a few pages long - you should be able to easily read it in ten minutes.

Beastly Gerbil

14:25

Looks like an interesting story, so will do later :)

Rand al'Thor

All Borges stories are interesting :-)

"Interesting" is an understatement for most of them.

Beastly Gerbil

Never read one before :P

Rand al'Thor

Fascinating, wacky, weird and wonderful.

@BeastlyGerbil You're missing out.

"The Library of Babel", "The Circular Ruins", "The Garden of Forking Paths", "Funes, his Memory", "A Survery of the Works of Herbert Quain" ... all full of crazy ideas.

Beastly Gerbil

I shall make a note to read them :)

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor You sure can, if you count letters that occur only rarely. I think ẁ and ẃ are unique to Welsh, the ij digraph (which may or may not count as a letter) is unique to Dutch, if Malta is in western Europe then ħ counts for Maltese. I think ÿ is NOT unique to French proper nouns, but œ is probably unique to French.

If someone who I respect less said this, I'd tell them that they're biased by English, which indeed does not have any letters that aren't used in other languages.

(And that's only if you count modern times. If you get into futhark-variants, you'll find more stuff.)

Rand al'Thor

14:33

@b_jonas But most of these are just variants of letters which are found in many languages. If you don't count diacritics as making new letters, the number is much fewer.

OK, so c-with-cedilla might be unique to French, or e-with-hook to Polish. But these are just variants of c and e.

The eth and thorn are totally different letters.

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor Aren't basically ALL letters we use in latin/cyrillic/greek/hebrew/arabic eventually variants distantly derived from phoenician, except maybe some of the letters used in coptic? I think the eth and thorn are derived from other latin letters too.

Hmm, maybe not. The thorn þ apparently originates from a futhark runes letter that in turn probably doesn't originate from latin or greek (despite that some futhark rune letters do).

I don't understand why that matters too much, and I think you're sort of moving the goalposts now.

The eth ð is probably derived from the latin letter d though, mind you.

Rand al'Thor

@b_jonas Being distantly derived from Phoenician isn't the same as being identical to another modern-day letter with an extra diacritic somewhere.

Admittedly, some languages treat diacritics differently from others.

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor And no, ç is definitely not unique to French. It's used in other European languages including Turkish.

Rand al'Thor

In French, e-with-acute or a-with-circumflex are just treated as variants of e and a. In Scandinavian languages, a-with-circle is treated as its very own letter.

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor "treated as variants" and "treated as its own letter" is so vague. it depends on what purposes, and when, and it gets complicated.

Treated the same in crossword puzzles? Sorted at the same place in alphabetized lists? Gets its own type on old cheap typewriters or printers? Doesn't get its own hole on one of those letter pattern ruler things?

Rand al'Thor

14:41

Sure. But most letters used in western European languages can be argued, at least, to be a small variant of a letter used in, say, English (e.g. that same letter with an extra diacritic). Eth and thorn can't.

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor I'm not sure I buy that about eth. Thorn, maybe.

b_jonas

15:07

9

A: Are there any recorded discrepancies between The Odyssey as oral tradition and The Odyssey as Homer transcribed it?

On the answer Much of the structure of this answer is based on the very clear history of #The Odyssey# and #The Illiad# written by Nicolas Bertrand in a 2009 Article (PDF). The primary sources discussed are the following, and I will try to reference them more closely in successive edits, but thi...

^ Oh! Really nice extended answer.

Gallifreyan

Really nice indeed

b_jonas

Although it's somewhat strange, because I really thought the Illiad and Odyssey were canonized way earlier than what this suggests. (Compare this with the Christian bible.)

Rand al'Thor

@Gallifreyan Btw, I hope you appreciated my starred picture in here :-)

b_jonas

Hehe, it's funny when I view that question about the Odyssey (because Em is still editing it), and the sidebar points to the meta post on "Should answers [posted by] authors be treated differently from other answers?"

Gallifreyan

15:27

@Randal'Thor I did, sounds like a great illustration for that question about author vs. critics

11

Q: How much weight is given to authors' intentions in literary analysis?

When people analyze literature, one of the first things people seem to do is look for interviews or quotes from the author where the author describes the meaning they intended their text to have. My question is: when academics and professors of literature analyze texts, how much weight do they ...

theory authorial-intent

Or this one

23

Q: The author of a literary work disagrees with critics about meaning—who's right?

I've just come up with a conjecture on what a piece of literature means, but the author has said that they didn't mean for their work to suggest that. For example, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is often considered an iconic book about censorship, but Bradbury says that he didn't write the book a...

meaning authorial-intent

Rand al'Thor

14 hours ago, by Rand al'Thor

Brb, editing this into all the meta posts about authorial intent.

Gallifreyan

@Randal'Thor I wouldn't mind :)

On an unrelated note, this:

Would fit nicely here:

56

Q: Did the writers of Wonder Woman have some kind of fetish for bondage, in the early comics?

I've been reading the golden age comics of Wonder Woman, and she was completely different than she is today. She used to become powerless when chained by a man (by Aphrodite's law) and there were always some incidents where the bad guys capture her and weld her bracelets or tie her with her own ...

dc comics wonder-woman

@Randal'Thor by the way, didn't we discuss this before?

Rand al'Thor

@Gallifreyan I've definitely made that argument before, but it may have just been in chat rather than on meta.

I don't think we've had a dedicated meta post for country tags vs language tags before now.

Gallifreyan

@Randal'Thor the answer here discusses it:

10

Q: Do we need such broad tags on questions about specific works?

It has come up in chat that the usage and existence of such broad tags as russian-literature or short-stories (or mexico) on questions asking about specific works are debatable. On one hand, they help categorize a question, for the purpose of finding it - and we have agreed that we want to use ...

discussion tags

Voted to dupe-hammer

Rand al'Thor

@Gallifreyan Not in enough detail to warrant a dupe closure, IMO.

It's good to have different meta posts to cover different facets of a topic, rather than trying to shoehorn it all into one.

The new meta post gives us a consensus that language tags > country tags. The old meta post doesn't, because there's so much else in those answers that people might have been upvoting or downvoting them for reasons entirely unrelated to that particular facet of the issue.

Gallifreyan

15:39

@Randal'Thor but Skooba's answer directly says that we should have language tags rather than country tags

The body of the question is asking about different things, I admit, but the answer addresses the dupe and is upvoted

Rand al'Thor

@Gallifreyan Where? He mentions language-of-origin, but I can't see where he says explicitly that those should be used instead of country tags. And the example he discusses is russian-literature, which is ambiguous as it could be either.

Gallifreyan

@Randal'Thor Maybe you're right.

Bookworm

18:34

1

Q: Is there any textual evidence that this character's death symbolized the death of childhood?

In the beginning of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, we see that Hedwig is killed by Avada Kedavra: "No - HEDWIG!" The broomstick spun to earth, but he just managed to seize the strap of his rucksack and the top of the cage as the motorbike swung the right way up again. A second's reli...

symbolism j-k-rowling harry-potter

Martin Ender

19:10

@Bookworm This level of despoilering the title doesn't seem useful because it means I need to click the question to find out what book it's even about if I only see the title.

Rand al'Thor

@MartinEnder But you can see the tags before clicking the question.

Martin Ender

Provided I see the question on a question list of literature.SE

I won't see tags if I see this a) via HNQ, b) in the related/linked sidebar of another question.

Rand al'Thor

True.

But there's an age-old debate about whether it's useful to put tags in titles, and AFAIK the conclusion is no.

Martin Ender

Oh yeah, definitely agree with that. I'm just wondering whether there's a way to phrase the title so that for people who know Harry Potter it's vaguely clear that the question is about Harry Potter.

Rand al'Thor

> Is there any textual evidence that this death in Deathly Hallows symbolized the end of childhood?

Martin Ender

19:18

I just saw your suggestion for Icelandic Sagas. I've had a massive 4-volume collection plus 1 volume of comments on my shelf for years but never got around to reading them... I should totally do that some time.

@Randal'Thor I like it! :) @Mithrandir

Rand al'Thor

That way, anyone who sees the title will know not only that it's HP but also how far through HP they should expect spoilers for.

Mithrandir

Somehow I doubt that it will HNQ, but fine...

Martin Ender

> b) in the related/linked sidebar of another question.

Mithrandir

Related questions use tags, don't they...?

Rand al'Thor

@MartinEnder Done.

@Mithrandir You still don't see the tags in the sidebar.

Mithrandir

19:20

Also, I should wake up. It's only 10:20, and I'm tired for some reason :/

Rand al'Thor

And if it shows up in "related questions" because they're both tagged symbolism, there's no way of knowing what book it's about.

@Mithrandir Oh, you've crossed the Atlantic?

Mithrandir

PM.

I was taking a nap ;)

Rand al'Thor

Hang on, you're three hours ahead of GMT?

I thought it was two.

Daylight saving?

Mithrandir

Changed the clocks Friday.

Martin Ender

maybe DST has started over there?

Rand al'Thor

19:23

I think it happens ... tonight? ... here.

Martin Ender

same here

I think in the US it's actually a full week off

Mithrandir

It happened already there, no?

Martin Ender

I know that in October it ended a week later than it did here

Martin Ender

19:36

@Mithrandir I don't want to commit, but I'd be interested in an update when the first writing challenge was picked.

Mithrandir

@MartinEnder Sure, I'll ping you. If it ever gets enough people committed :/

Rand al'Thor

21:38

4

A: Is there a site for literature?

Yes! Literature is currently in public beta - anyone can participate, and the site is thriving. Come along and join us in asking and answering all manner of questions about literature!

Let's try to make this the top-voted answer ...

Mithrandir

@Randal'Thor that isn't asking for rep at all :P

Rand al'Thor

@Mithrandir I couldn't care less about rep on meta.

Who do you think I am, Emrakul? :-P

Mithrandir

@Randal'Thor ...yes?

I love how the answer to this was Literature.SE:

4

A: Which SE Community is best for aid recalling from childhood a book not pertinent to Literature.SE?

You can ask on Literature.SE. Your question looks like it would be perfectly fine for Literature.SE - comics are on topic, so why not picture books? They're books too - just make sure to tag it story-identification. (As you can see, we decided that ID-questions are on topic.) If you really wa...

The title... :P

Also, sorry if I confused you on the meta, I'm sleeping...

Librarian

21:58

1

Q: Announcing the April 2017 Topic Challenge: "Hard to Be a God"

After the support gained here for the idea of regular topic challenges on Literature as a way of hopefully broadening our cultural scope, a new post was set up here to gather suggestions for specific topics to be used. Since it's been decided to have month-long topic challenges, the first one wil...

discussion topic-challenge

Mithrandir

@Librarian featured

Rand al'Thor

@Mithrandir Danke.

We can also delete this answer, but let's wait until April when the challenge actually starts. At this point it's all about visibility, so it makes sense to leave the original proposal in place for extra visibility.

+1 for the Wait until the month actually starts, you impatient person. — Mithrandir ♦ 1 min ago

@Mithrandir I thought you of all people would appreciate that ;-)

Napoleon Wilson

22:59

@Librarian Very very unfortunate timing.

Rand al'Thor

@NapoleonWilson Why?

Napoleon Wilson

@Randal'Thor Because your answer was on catching up.

Rand al'Thor

... oh.

Quick, everyone go and upvote the Strugatsky answer! :-P

Anyway, we never made a strict promise that the highest-voted suggestion would always win. I'd feel slightly bad about coming in at the last moment with an idea that shot to the top and then that being the first topic challenge.

Martin Ender

I really hope that the sagas won't make it before May because there's no way I'll get around to start reading them in April :D

(although I read three versions of the Edda some ten years ago, but that's way too long to contribute to the challenge in a meaningful way)

Transcript for