She had almost a dozen poems published during her lifetime, and although they were heavily edited it wasn't any more or less than was being done to other poets.
And she shared her poems freely with her friends, frequently breaking into verse in the middle of a letter.
Dickinson's character has been altered post-mortem almost as much as Poe's.
Also, does anyone have a subscription to Time magazine? I've found an article which might help to supplement one of my answers, but most of it is hidden behind a paywall :-/
Out of curiosity, is there a reason why my the-waste-land questions haven't been getting a lot of attention? Should I be writing these questions differently?
@Hamlet I think you're doing fine. I'm not familiar with The Waste Land, and so I've abstained from voting on those, but they don't seem to have any issues - other than perhaps obscurity, which is not your fault.
This is my first time to participate in an SE beta. I've gotten a badge or two already, but I noticed that they show up in my notifications as the same shape as whatever other SE sites use (i.e., a film reel from Movies & TV).
When will Literature get its own badge shapes?
I thougnt about Melmoth the Wanderer, since I really enjoyed it, but then again, I don't want to look like these guys named after their single question. ;-)
@Randal'Thor I was making a humorous observation about Morgoth, and I don't think too terribly about Mim. Have some sympathy for the guy; he was the last of his kind (with his sons).
@NapoleonWilson @DJMcMayhem On Mythology, we treat the Bible and other religious works just like any other mythology.
We don't care about whether or not it actually happened. That's the only way to avoid offending people. We treat it like a collection of stories, not as religious material, per se.
@Randal'Thor Sure. The most notable difference here is that SFF is specifically dedicated to fiction, and saying "<fill in the blank religious text> is fictional" is offensive because a lot of people believe it
Literary non-fiction is a form of non-fiction, in which the author uses the techniques of literature to describe a factually accurate account of a true occurrence. Is this on topic?
Yes, the situation is a lot different on Literature or SFF than on Mythology. Everyone respects the stories; all are considered equal. Fictional mythologies are on-topic - I think; we haven't really had any - but everything else was created to be real. Elsewhere, a lot of works are just made up.
Chat used to check the referer to determine which list of rooms to show, and the chat links were useful then. Unfortunately, that doesn't work if the browser doesn't send a referrer - which is common enough to make abandoning that strategy worthwhile.
If you can ask a good literary question about a work, does the nature of the work make it somehow not literature anyway?
We seem to be labouring under the illusion that literature can be firmly defined. Didn't we already try and fail to do this kind of hardline scope work in scifi.se, rpg.se, etc?
Academically, literature is whatever is taught in academia. That's circular and useless.
When you start including stuff just for inclusion's sake and because you'd like to pick yourself the great literary analysis questions about songs and films, then I'm not gonna be on board.
I'm asking a moderately complicated literary question, and I'm giving what I believe is a very, very thorough answer to it, concerning a video game. We can decide from there.
Oxenfree is a horror video game about a teenager named Alex who... takes a trip to an island, and discovers some elements.
It's definitively a horror game: the elements it introduces and the gameplay feel and look as though they're designed to bring about a deep sense of disquiet.
What element...
The reason I supported Literature was that it's no competition to the sites I love. But when it turns into "literature and the good questions about movies" then I might be pissed. But as said, that's highly hypothetical and I doubt it will actually happen.
@Ash The conventional definition of "literature," though, is one that's been cultivated and grown throughout history. What didn't count as literature very recently in our history now counts as literature.
Sure, but if we want to limit it, how are we going to do that? Are we really going to say that audiobooks don't count? Or that entire cultures without written traditions have nothing to say about storytelling we want to talk about?
The conventional definition of literature is cultivated by and for those invested in higher education as a sign of social worth in a particular set of connected societies.
@HDE226868 And a chance for somebody else to demonstrate what a really good reading-order answer should look like. (I like to think I've already made one.)
@Randal'Thor I never said they were. :) I just feel like I am fighting a battle that really, I don't feel like fighting because i honestly don't have enough of a passion to invest it.
@BESW I am really struggling to see how you would, but honestly, I regret even getting into this, because I don't want to be this invested.
The baseline problem is that "literature" is much more of a broad concept than people like to admit it is. If I can ask an interesting literary question about a piece of media, then it holds literary value, and doesn't that make it literature?
Whether it's oral tradition, movies, video games, or books, we can subject all these things to the lens of literary scrutiny.
@NapoleonWilson But if we're going to have a site about literature, and only allow certain kinds of literature, we're precluding the way most of the world communicates, and sticking only with the types of literature European/Anglo-Saxon communities developed.
Look at the history of what was accepted as "literature" against who was reading it when it was unaccepted vs accepted. Brontë's a good example.
So's Dickens.
"Literature" describes who approves of the thing, more than any quality of the thing itself.
By creating a site called literature.stackexchange.com, we've brought that history and onus on ourselves. If we ignore it, the site will not be taken seriously by the experts we desperately need.
Me? I'd love to see this as a site where people can offer sourced, supported solutions to questions about the complexity of pre-recorded narrative communication.
@Emrakul sure. Earlier it was whether it includes song lyrics or not. Then someone thought up a concrete example and hey it was pretty good and the discussion died down.
As someone who, professionally, has worked to create spaces for Pasifika literature to be seen because it's rejected as not literature by both Eastern and Western publishers, it's not mythical to me.
Back when Seasoned Advice was first getting off the ground, I thought it'd be really great if it had drink mixing questions and such. Some other folks thought it'd be nice to have questions on good techniques for making pot brownies. We spent a LOOOT of time talking about that stuff. Not a lot of questions ever showed up.
It was still, y'know, fun and everything
But... If it stops being fun, if folks are getting serious, maybe stop & think that you're anticipating a problem that'd be a really good problem to have since it means folks are just clamoring to ask stuff here.
Most of the time, that's not the problem that actually presents itself.
@Randal'Thor Indeed, it is. I'm sorry. But well, it's very important to me, it's what I care most about. I won't deny it's a personal issue, but I won't give it up either.
I come back to this chatroom after a day, and what do I see? A mindful discussion on the works of Dostoevsky? No, I see memes. Memes. Come on guys, I appreciate memes as much as you all do but the purposeful overuse of memes for the sole purpose of annoying others is wrong. If you want to post a meme occasionally, that's fine. But if all you want to talk about is memes, find somewhere else to do it.
@HDE226868 sure. Bearing in mind that, a month, a year from now, there probably still won't be very many because - regardless of what a proper abstract definition for "literature" should be, regardless of what a good inclusive comprehensive Stack Exchange site about literature should have - literature just ain't gonna scream "song lyrics" to most passers-by
Welcome @LianneCaranthir! I liked your answer to the Byronic hero question: it uses a much better source than mine, albeit with a much shorter description.
Science-Fiction & Fantasy has a policy of excluding all religious texts. This makes sense because SFF is about fiction, and stating that a particular religious text is fictional is pretty offensive to those who believe it. However, I feel like we are in a slightly different situation because our ...
In some places, Wikipedia might be considered okay, in others it is adamantly denied. The same can be said of .com or .net websites, which I've found to be perfectly useful in my own experience.
What guidelines should we have for deciding whether a source is suitable or not?
Hmm. There's a lot of talk about "just ask a question and see what happens" (e.g. @HDE's comment just now on the opera meta question, or some of what BESW and Shog have been saying), but @Emrakul also said that a question being closed during private beta doesn't really set a useful precedent for site scope. So when you just ask a question and see what happens, what does "what happens" actually tell you, if not resolving the on-topicness issue?
@Randal'Thor What I look for are the types of answers that a question is going to get. The two core issues are: a) can a question about the topic be sufficiently literary in nature? and b) do the answers about the topic reflect the sort of literary discussion I'd want the site to support?
I see. So posting an actual question about [operas|video games|musical scores|etc.] is more about giving us a concrete example to discuss on meta than about trying to set a precedent on main?
Can someone put a link to the site in the room description? I know it's not that hard to type in, but most site rooms have a link to their site in the desc, and it's honestly easier
Robert Cartaino has suggested elsewhere that it might even be a good idea to limit discussions to those problems of which at least 5 concrete examples can be found
M'rr. I'm not convinced, since it eg means the discussion of recommendations was already considered over before I could contribute RPG.SE's experience on the topic.
Since I'd, you know, have wanted to compare RPG.SE's experience to lit.se's experience and draw conclusions from similarities or differences.
RPG.SE's experience is very different from scifi.se's.
To be perfectly honest, if we'd been watching more closely we probably would've shut down all of those discussions (and have in the past on other new sites); too much temptation to fight proxy battles, too little material to actually come to solid conclusions relevant to this site.
ID questions, rec questions, list questions... Do tend to cause serious problems on the sites where they're common. But they're not common on every site. The last iteration of this topic suffered mightily from them; who knows if this one will.
I'm voting to reopen my own question on principle, because I think closing it misses and/or closes down an opportunity to even discuss the topicality of narrative outside the scope of "traditional" literature.
We had a good sense of what the problems were and what would fix 'em, though. We just had more faith in our community to do it than perhaps was prudent.
@Emrakul ...or the relationship between Dear Esther and choose-your-own-adventure stories.
Found this out when trying to recite the alphabet in messages.
When you hit the rate limit in chat, and there is 1 seconds left, it says the incorrect form. It shouldn't be plural.
Example:
Can this be fixed please?
Seriously, this is slightly irritating. I am not just posting this to poin...
Science-Fiction & Fantasy has a policy of excluding all religious texts. This makes sense because SFF is about fiction, and stating that a particular religious text is fictional is pretty offensive to those who believe it. However, I feel like we are in a slightly different situation because our ...