The Reading Room

8:00 AM

@Bookworm Aslan as an alternative version of Jesus as the form in which he may have appeared in an alternative HNQ.

2 hours later…

10:01 AM

@Tsundoku Your quarterly reputation is the same as your user ID, 2191 :-)

1 hour later…

Q: his departure or farewell was a kind of **solidification**

11:22 AM

“But I had to give up on that idea or hope, I had to wrench it out of my head and heart, or out of my cunt, as the women say back in Torre del Greco, and although I never completely gave up, somehow I understood Jack’s reluctance or his stubbornness, the luminous, fresh, honey-slow silence surrou...

meaning

11:35 AM

@Bookworm Jigging questions of rhyming hot network lists.

Q: Whatever happened to Barthes' "Science of Literature"?

12:12 PM

In Criticism and Truth (1966), Roland Barthes puts forward what we might call a manifesto for both a science of literature on the one hand, and of literary criticism on the other: Criticism is about how to approach a literary work, it is "the intention of giving a particular meaning to the work"...

history-of-literature literary-criticism roland-barthes

Q: Are there any autobiographical elements in Bleak House?

12:37 PM

What are the autobiographical elements, if any, in Bleak House by Charles Dickens?

charles-dickens bleak-house

12:48 PM

@Bookworm I tried to polish this one a bit, but it feels like a low-effort homework question. Let's see if the OP will respond to comments.

6 hours later…

Gallifreyan

6:46 PM

Apparently, the Irkutsk bibliophile union, which was recently labeled a "foreign agent" by the Russian ministry of justice, is doing very well at the moment

They've had loads of new people join their online groups, express support, share their posts, etc.

The downside is the mandatory label they have to put on all their posts and messages, and monthly reports to the ministry

Oh, yeah, bibliophiles are so dangerous. Those people quietly sitting in their rooms poring over their cherished volumes. Imagine they started throwing books at the government.

Gallifreyan

Yup, gotta watch out for those people

12. Preparing the Defences

►

2 hours later…

Q: How did the Epic of Manas become a national epic of the Kyrgyz people?

8:32 PM

The Epic of Manas "is a traditional epic poem dating to the 18th century but claimed by Kyrgyz tradition to be much older". The footer of the Wikipedia article about the epic treats it as an example of national epic poems and adds the article to the category National symbols of Kyrgyzstan. The ep...

history-of-literature kyrgyz-literature epic-of-manas

1 hour later…

Q: Which French author or critic claimed that Racine and La Fontaine could not be understood by foreigners?

9:47 PM

Jean Racine (1639–1699) is considered "one of the three great playwrights of 17th-century France, along with Molière and Corneille". The Wikipedia article about the playwright contains a section on the reception of his work, for example in the 19th century, where we find the following information...

french-literature history-of-literature la-fontaine jean-racine

Q: Evidence that many early readers misunderstood A Modest Proposal as a serious recommendation?

10:12 PM

The Wikipedia article on satire has a section on censorship and criticsim which contains the following claim: For instance, at the time of its publication, many people misunderstood Swift's purpose in A Modest Proposal, assuming it to be a serious recommendation of economically motivated canniba...

jonathan-swift a-modest-proposal

10:40 PM

Gustave Flaubart was born on this day 200 years ago.

11:13 PM

@Riker? You haven't been around here for ages!

11:41 PM

@Tsundoku indeed

Some of us were a bit surprised when you deleted your account here. Anyway, I hope you're doing well.

i switched schools around 3 years ago now, ended up tapering off due to that + getting busy irl. came back around a week or two ago cuz i was curious about rand's opinions on the amazon WoT show :)

yeah, I don't really remember why, but I tihnk it was a combination of monica + some other drama that came up, plus my main site was always codegolf.se and that had some issues too

i'm surprised though, i didn't realize it would be remarked on lol

Well, you were on first page of our reputation ranking, so it was bound to get noticed.

oh, was I? ack

I have seen some trailers of The Wheel of Time but I have no idea what Randal'Thor's opinion is.

11:47 PM

rand's opinion turned out to be "i'm not about to ruin my favorite piece of media by watching amazon butcher it", which is honestly fair - I like the show fine but i'll admit i'ts definitely not as good as the books (to the surprise of no one)

So on 24 March 2020, you ranked 9th in reputation with 5641 reps.

wacky. i think the site came out in like feb, march?

or am i tripping

In early 2017.

oh wait that was LAST year my reading comprehension sucks

Q: Evidence that "What is an author?" and "The death of the author" had a bombshell effect?

The French Wikipedia article about Roland Barthes has a section on the literary critic's essay "The death of the author" containing the following statement: Conjugué à la conférence de Michel Foucault intitulée « Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur ? » publiée en juillet 196924, l’article de Barthes fait l’e...

theory roland-barthes michel-foucault

11:52 PM

And we're graduating in three days. We don't need to wait until we've been around for seven years :-)

wait, wtf? congrats lol

it's finals wk rn (had 2 on fri, next 2 are today/tomorrow) so i've been kinda out of it hte last week or two, haven't bothered actually getting active on SE again yet. totally didn't see that