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Eng Lit Learner

04:12

Q: How do native English speakers know the archaic or domain/time specific words in English literature like The Tale of Two Cities?

I have been reading The Tale of Two Cities for multiple months. The progress is pretty slow because I would like to know most of the details in a way that I can learn some literature techniques in English by Charles Dickens. However, I'm wondering how native English speakers know the archaic or d...

2 hours later…

User1865345

06:28

Are Myth Retellings Overrated? Unpopular opinion, but

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Bookworm

Q: Meaning of "on the dreary littorals of Alexandria, with her sex broken" in Durrell's Justine

I'm unable to figure out the meaning of this sentence in Lawrence Durrell's Justine: I found Melissa, washed up like a half-drowned bird, on the dreary littorals of Alexandria, with her sex broken.... Durrell, Lawrence. Justine. 1957, rev. 1962. The Alexandra Quartet pp. 13–203. With a new intro...

meaning lawrence-durrell the-alexandria-quartet

Bookworm

07:19

Q: Narrator's name in Durrell's Justine

The back cover of my copy of Lawrence Durrell's 1957–1962 The Alexandria Quartet refers to the narrator as L. G. Darley ("L. G. Darley attempts to reconcile himself with [sic] the end of his affair with the dark, passionate Justine"). But as far as I can tell, the narrator is not named anywhere i...

name-significance the-alexandria-quartet lawrence-durrell

Mithical

07:39

sudden influx of @verbose questions

Bookworm

Q: What is the purpose of the "Workpoints" appended to Durrell's Justine?

At the end of Lawrence Durrell's Justine (1957, rev. 1962) is a brief appendix called "Workpoints." They appear to be either Durrell's jottings about his characters and settings, or outtakes from the novel. For example, there is a list of characters with curt summaries: CHARACTER-SQUEEZES Sveva ...

lawrence-durrell the-alexandria-quartet

Q: What is the "strife" that makes a city strong in "Oedipus"?

In Oedipus Tyrannus, after Jocasta reveals to Oedipus that Laius was killed where "three roads meet", Oedipus begins to freak out, beginning to realize that it was indeed him who killed the late king. The Chorus then goes into their ode, which includes these lines: But the healthy strife that ma...

meaning greek-language sophocles oedipus-rex

verbose

08:30

@Mithical It's my standard MO. When I have a question as I'm reading a book, I tend not to ask it right away as I think, "Perhaps this will be explained later in the book." Then when I've finished the book, I end up with a l'lle stack of questions about things that are not explained, so I end up posting them all at once.

Mithical

@verbose I do the opposite :p I tend to ask questions as I encounter them, or I'll write them down as I go along if I encounter more than one thing to ask about in the same day

verbose

@Mithical I've noticed :P

Mithical

I'm going to attribute that tendency to having had Lit.SE as a part of the reading process for so long, particularly at a young age. It's become instinct to go "Oh, I can ask a question about that" as a standard part of reading a text.

Bookworm

08:49

Q: Why does Nessim steal Balthazar's key in Justine?

A significant event in Lawrence Durrell's Justine is Balthazar's losing the key used to wind up the watch he has inherited from his father. The unnamed narrator comes upon him searching for the key in evident distress: We had met before, it is true, but glancingly; and would have perhaps passed ...

character-analysis lawrence-durrell the-alexandria-quartet

2 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

10:49

I guess my MO is a bit of both: I'll often read the whole book before asking (sometimes in a single sitting, as recently with a couple of CS Lewis and Agatha Christie novels) and store up questions as I go along, but then I'll post the questions in a spaced-out way, not more than one per day.

@verbose if you're interested in a Socratic badge, the most efficient way to post questions is not more than one per day. 5 good questions in a single day only counts as 1 day towards Inquisitive/Socratic badges.

1 hour later…

Peter Shor

12:11

@Randal'Thor One advantage of spacing your questions out, if you have a lot of questions about the same work, is that the answers to earlier questions may shed light on the questions you haven't asked yet.

I think this may have happened with my recent answer to Questions about Alfred Noyes' Midnight Express #3: What is Mortimer's "escape"?, but since the OP doesn't seem to completely believe my answer, it didn't help them much.

User1865345

@PeterShor that's indeed a good strategy.

Guardian: Five of the best translated fiction of 2024

Audio book of the week: The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins review – a tense thriller from The Girl on the Train author

Bookworm

12:34

Q: What's the title of this sci-fi story about a sentient planet?

It's an early short SIFI story. 1950 to 1960's maybe. 3 people are on an unusual planet that seems sentient. A young man, a young woman, and a little older man say 30 years old. The young woman has a crush on the slightly older guy. He eventually kills her. This seems to bring about his healing a...

identification-request

4 hours later…

Peter Shor

16:38

@Mithical I began reading long before Lit.SE, but when I come up with a question that I can't answer, for example What does this gesture mean or What was the clue that let Carla find the missing papers, sometimes I ask it.

Whereas before Lit.SE, I would have just shrugged my shoulders and wondered about it briefly. I only try to do this with books that I think other people might enjoy reading, though.

verbose

17:05

@Randal'Thor You and @PeterShor make good points. I especially take Peter's about answers illuminating other potential qs. But the suggested strategy of posting questions in a spaced out manner after reading the entire book entails keeping the book around and engaging with it for several days after I'm done and have moved on to the next one. Which is sometimes impractical—for example, if I have the book checked out from a library and need to return it, I can't always hang on to it.

Also, I guess I just tend to move on rather quickly. Like, I'm already partway through two other books (and I finished Justine only yesterday). Keeping the Durrell volume around causes both physical and mental clutter, I think.

I'm not particularly enjoying one of the two (Felice Picano's Ambidextrous) and I'm not knowledgeable enough to fully grok the other (Emmie te Nijenhuis's Indian Music). But then I didn't really enjoy Justine either, at least not until the last section of the book, when I suddenly realized I'd missed one major thread therein.

@PeterShor There's always someone else out there who'd enjoy reading a given book that you are enjoying, surely? I mean, the book must have some sort of wider readership than just you. I think if we ask questions about all kinds of books, then we might attract all kinds of folks who might otherwise believe that LitSE doesn't cater to their tastes. No?

That said, yes, I too now turn to LitSE to ask about points that I'd've otherwise ignored.

4 hours later…

Bookworm

21:11

Q: What is the single word in Gabriela Mistral's La que camina?

The second stanza in Gabriela Mistral's poem La que camina introduces a "single word" that is somehow vital to the woman described in the poem. The poem's second and third stanzas can be translated as follows (emphasis mine): The very wrinkle of the burning earth leads it, scorches it and obeys ...