The Reading Room - 2017-06-30

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12:00 AM

@Gallifreyan ... why? If they're decent answers, then every new one is helping to increase the amount of useful material on the site. New answers from new users on that question will increase nearly all our stats. I think we should only protect it if it starts to attract low-quality answers.

@Hamlet It's a bit rude to accuse someone of "freaking out" when they're just concerned that one of the regulars hasn't popped in for a while.

... OK, now to peruse @Hamlet 's The Waste Land feedback and think some more ...

(will try to keep the number of pings to a minimum)

Definitely agreed on the difficulty. I spent a long time close-reading those first four stanzas, and I still don't really understand what they're all about. But hey, it wouldn't be so rewarding if there was no challenge in it.

@Hamlet All I'm aiming for in that answer is a plausible interpretation (or rather two). I've drawn some connections which could point towards justifying my interpretations, but I'm aware that some of them are quite tenuous and they're probably not numerous enough to really confirm either interpretation.

If you're hoping for a definitive answer, I don't have one. I just have some plausible interpretations, and some evidence to support them but not confirm them, to make them plausible but not positive.

So yeah, the tree -> hanging and paper -> dust and rock -> rock connections are a bit weak. I came up with them after the main answer, not the other way round.

The way I constructed that answer was something like: read stanza 2, wonder what "heap of broken images" means; read stanza 3, aha, tarot, that has a heap of images; find potential connections to support this interpretation; read stanza 4, stuff about corpses being planted and sprouting, hmm, that sounds a bit like the branches thing in stanza 2; find potential connections to support that interpretation; put it all together into an answer.

@Hamlet You seem to be seeing sex everywhere. Are you sure this isn't just you having a dirty mind? :-) There was "The Naming of Parts" ... and this post where you argued for a sexual interpretation ... and again ... and I'm sure there was somewhere else just recently when you were seeing some sexual interpretation that seemed unwarranted to me.

@Mithrandir You can also save them in a text file. That's what I've done a few times when I've got a lot of material to use in writing up an answer but no time to put it all together yet. Along with my list of Lit questions to ask, saved in the same text file.

Oh btw, @Peter, in case you didn't see it: I posted another WWI poetry question today. Maybe you can make it a hat trick? :-)

12:57 AM

@Randal'Thor I did see it. I'm less sure of that particular one. However, I am forming an answer to the Eliot question. I've studied that work extensively.

Oh, the Silas Marner one? Great! That's gone unanswered for aaaaaages; I thought it'd been lost forever.

I studied that book for English Lit GCSE.

Oh sorry. I mean T.S. Eliot.

Waste Land

Oh right.

Hamlet has asked several Waste Land questions; I think at least two or three are still unanswered, or at least have no accepted answer.

Fantastic. I'll spend some time with those and explore other unanswered ones.

1:26 AM

@Randal'Thor there are literally multiple explicit sex scenes in The Waste Land

> I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;

@Peter that's fantastic!

@Randal'Thor @Peter I haven't received a satisfactory answer for any of my Waste Land questions, so all of them are fair game.

Good to know. It may be the case that the work itself makes finding a satisfactory answer a life-long pursuit.

@Peter I'm trying to teach everyone on this site close reading. Any advice? You said you were an English teacher...

Here's the answer that I wrote to try and teach people:

3

A: Why does the poem "Naming of Parts" contrast war with nature?

This question is best answered using a technique called close reading. What is close reading, and why is it important? It simply means reading something closely, i.e. paying careful attention to every word in a passage, and seeing how the exact wording of a passage creates meaning. Why is close ...

I was. The best advice is that every claim has to be backed up by direct evidence.

I taught in a Great Books environment with a seminar-approach

@Randal'Thor You really want to limit yourself to a single passage when you close read. That way you'll really be able to dig in. Don't worry about finding an overarching theme for the entire poem; just try to understand the passage your focusing on.

The right answer is the one that is well defended and there are multiple "right" answers

2

1:35 AM

@Peter Couldn't agree more; I try not to accept answers on this site for that very reason.

I tried to model close reading in my analysis of my Seed-Merchant answer

@Hamlet Especially for questions dealing with modernism. The movement is the opposite of "definitive" in terms of meaning.

@Randal'Thor I'm not sure if you succeeded at that. Again, you have to watch out for false positives. There might be one connection between two ideas. But the basis of one connection isn't enough to tell you if the connection is meaningful, or what the connection means. You need to find multiple connections.

The challenge to close reading though is Derrida's notion of différance. Meaning can always be undercut. That's the tension between close reading and contemporary/post-modern literary criticism. The erasure of meaning.

@Randal'Thor IDK, I can talk more about your Waste Land answer, but I think you would be better off finding a very short, simpler poem, and practicing with that.

@Hamlet Does that necessarily mean there are sexual undertones to the first stanzas though? Anyway, see, I hadn't read that stanza you quoted, so I had no idea of this context.

@Hamlet Well, by limiting myself to a single passage I missed the whole sex thing :-)

1:43 AM

@Randal'Thor silvia plath would be a great poet to work with: poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/…

@Randal'Thor all of the descriptions of vegetation/plants have sexual undertones.

I'm not sure if it's available online but "How Does a Poem Mean" by John Ciardi, a famous Dante translator, is great for diving into poetic analysis.

2

@Randal'Thor yeah, that's one of the reason why The Waste Land maybe isn't the best poem to start close reading with.

@Peter I kindove get what this means. It's come up in my reading of Invisible Cities and Unbearable Lightness of Being. But not really. Literature isn't actually my field of study.

Both excellent works of literature. If you liked Invisible Cities, you have to read If on a winter's night a traveler.

@Peter Yeah, I know, its on my list

Awesome

1:55 AM

@Peter have you read Stanislaw Lem? Favorite scifi author, and the only one that has original ideas.

@Peter and I asked an Invisible Cities question a while back, if you're interested in answering.

I have not. I'm not well versed in sci-fi.

I'll add that to my list of ones to look up.

@Hamlet Thanks for the rec. (Btw, did you see my question and discussion of "The Unreturning" the other day? Close reading, together with Peter's answer, really increased my understanding of that poem massively.)

@Randal'Thor I saw it... you pinged me about it in chat actually

@Hamlet "the only one that has original ideas" - harsh?

2:10 AM

@Randal'Thor bit of an exaggeration, obviously. How about "the author with the most original ideas"

Nice chatting with you all. Have to head out for a bit. See ya!

@Peter night. Hope you keep participating; I've really enjoyed your posts so far.

@Peter if you're still here, or when you get back, could you recommend some resources on "reader response criticism"?

3:17 AM

0

Q: Explain Asimov's joke

I recently came upon a short story, Death of a Foy (1980), in the compendium The Winds of Change (1983). In the intro, Asimov states that he was "hardly able to stop laughing", but I just can't seem to get the joke. In particular, it's a two page story that ends with the paragraph "Give my b...

1 hour later…

4:38 AM

is this on topic?

for this site I mean

user15026

I don't see why it wouldn't be

thanks for responding, I thought it would be too technical

math/philosophical

2 hours later…

user61230

6:58 AM

@Gallifreyan @Mithrandir I've been going through some pretty significant life stress for... a while, the past couple months, at least. I haven't really been checking the site, because Stack Exchange just hasn't been on my mind.

@Emrakul ah. Hope the situation improves soon :/

user61230

7:21 AM

cc @Hamlet too, I think

8:17 AM

J.R.R. Tolkien's full name is Jolkien Rolkien Rolkien Tolkien.

Tweeted by UNTRESOR on January 12, 2016 at 5:27 PM

...no. Poor John.

we call him "Jol" for short

8:38 AM

@Randal'Thor A couple of last answers were of the form "I read LotR before Sil, and it as awesome, and it gave me a great understanding of the lore", which, while supporting the conclusions of the previous answer, is a poor answer on its own right because it's so subjective.

8:59 AM

10

Q: How to proceed with an answer that is ultimately the same as a previous answer?

I wrote an answer to a question, then after posting I realised that the actual answer I gave was precisely the same as the actual answer already given, so I deleted my answer, and upvoted the earlier one. The answer that was already there was simpler than mine and I believe had extraneous parts ...

discussion duplicate-answers

How South Africa’s History Inspired A.J. Hartley’s Fantasy World.

7

Q: Is there anything that can be done about duplicate answer spam?

Some of our questions, especially good ones, draw a LOT of answers. Unfortunately, a lot of the time many of those answers make the same points over and over, often without introducing any new information. Even when they do differ somewhat we often have a situation where someone asks something ...

discussion answers duplicate-answers

31

Q: Stop repeating answers, please

A certain kind of questions attract many answers which are essentially the same answer repeated in different words, or posted with different formatting, or expanded to include all sorts of only vaguely related things. (Overly long answers and lack of brevity could be another topic, but I just men...

discussion duplicate-answers

That, or protect.

Lots of good different takes on the situation in the answers above.

Personally, I think that it's important to evaluate answers on their own merits and not relative to the merits of other answers.

Whenever a question with lots of answers comes to my attention, I scroll to the bottom and start reading through the posts with a score of 1 or below and read through them. They're usually neglected because regulars are fatigued by the question and have already stopped reading. I see if I like them and vote them up/down accordingly.

A post being bumped down from +0 to -1 makes people look a little more closely at it for badness.

And sometimes a good answer has just been neglected because nobody wants to read answer #12 of 19.

I feel it helps differentiate posts at the bottom rung where new answers would start. Consider the difference between seeing posts scored like this:

scenario 1: -1 -1 +0 +0 +0 +0 +0 +0 +1
scenario 2: -2 -2 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 +1 +2

the first makes it look like i can just chuck on whatever answer i want and maybe get an upvote or at the very least no negative attention, nobody's moderating this, i can say whatever i want.

the second hopefully makes a person think twice and go "err.... I don't like the look of all those downvotes... i should think more carefully about what i write here and whether i answer"

but the second set is just the first with one vote's difference

so I go through to try to put in that one vote difference, since sitting around that margin there's usually some lackluster posts which only barely answer the question, or OK answers that also just have some really bad advice or ethos buried in them, or pearls that nobody spotted for all the sand around them.

9:22 AM

After creating the first indigenous comic con in 2016, Lee Francis has taken the Native Nerd concept one step further with a brick and mortar indigenous comic store in downtown Albuquerque, N.M. called Red Planet Books and Comics.

2

10:02 AM

user image

i love the indigenous comic con logo

i-con is a pretty catchy short name

10:46 AM

@Emrakul Sorry to hear that. Hope things get easier for you soon!

@doppelgreener Isn't that another way of saying ... you love the i-con icon?

11:08 AM

@Randal'Thor i do! hahaha

11:39 AM

@Gallifreyan Not sure how I feel about the link to SFF's guidelines in the story-identification tag wiki. Really we should create our own meta guidelines post and link to that instead.

Anyway, I just edited the tag wiki, merging a few of your bullet points together.

I would've linked to the existing Lit meta guidelines post, but it has a comment from a mod saying he thinks story-ID should be entirely off-topic, which could confuse new users - "I came here looking for advice and get told they don't want my question at all?"

@Randal'Thor You forgot to add the "meaningful title" from the meta answer ;)

Good edit otherwise, it feels better now

@Randal'Thor if you feel that there's a problematic comment somewhere, please flag it.

@Mithrandir Eeeh. Meta is a space for conversation, and winnowing out comments to toe the party line isn't a good idea there. That space works differently.

@BESW I'd be much happier about a neutral comment, like "if you want to discuss whether or not these questions should be on-topic at all, please see [link]".

The meta post for discussing guidelines for a particular class of questions shouldn't devolve into a scope discussion, or make those questions feel unwelcome as a whole.

I don't see a problem with the linked comment anyway; it has a self-contained differentiation between individual preference and community policy.

It's healthy for users to see that the Stack is a living community whose policies emerge from the clash of opinions tempered by experiential learning.

11:47 AM

@Gallifreyan Oops, I assumed your meta answer and the existing tag wiki were identical.

Fixed.

On this specific case, though, I don't see what this adds to the conversation. It's a comment that says, essentially, 'I don't think these are on topic but since we've decided they are anyway let's make them less bad', which isn't a problem really but it doesn't contribute to what the post is about.

12:07 PM

William Shakespeare Needs More Gay (w/ Rantasmo)

6

Q: Is there any evidence for a gay relationship in The Merchant of Venice?

A couple of years ago, I went to a stage performance of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, in which Antonio and Bassanio were portrayed as being in a gay relationship together since before the start of the play. This correspondingly affected the romance between Bassanio and Portia, which was p...

william-shakespeare sexuality the-merchant-of-venice

They touch on that briefly. The video is a quick, broad tour of the range of queer theory in Shakespeare.

1 hour later…

1:24 PM

@Shokhet Done. I'm not too comfortable about that answer, but maybe I've just been too affected by the rep-obsessed SFF attitude. In any case, even if it gets downvotes on meta, at least I now have an actual list of my favourite answers, which I can use for my own reference later if nothing else.

2:02 PM

Last chance to ask The SEA is Ours questions for June's topic challenge! Only 10 hours left.

2:32 PM

Woo, two Lit HNQs!

The LotR/Sil one is still up, and now this one too.

I rarely watch videos instead of reading articles/summaries. Who is watching all the video that is supposedly such a gold mine?

Tweeted by mattzollerseitz on June 29, 2017 at 4:02 AM

This is a nice description of the Silmarillion, but could you add a little more explanation about why it should be read after Hobbit/LotR? — Rand al'Thor 1 hour ago

^ @Randal'Thor "Why would you protect it, Gallifreyan, it was drawing good content?"

Was.

I'd agree with protecting it now.

Also, have you gone back to misspelling your name? ;-)

Jinx.

3:28 PM

@Hamlet I have two suggestions. One, look up Lois Tyson's book Critical Theory Today. You can probably find it online. Each chapter is devoted to one literary theory with a sample essay on Gatsby to show how to apply said theory.

@Hamlet Two, look up the writings of Stanley Fish. He is one of the prominent critics behind the development of reader-response criticism.

@Randal'Thor Great! I'll check it out.

@Gallifreyan I was actually wondering about that, when I saw a 1 rep user just posted an answer.

3:50 PM

1

Q: What do the night and day in "The Unreturning" symbolise?

I now understand the poem "The Unreturning" much better than I did when I asked this question, thanks to Peter's excellent answer and my reading through it several more times and more carefully. It's about the dead (presumably, given the poet's history, those who were killed in war) being utterly...

poetry symbolism wilfred-owen

TIL the word "feghoot." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feghoot

Les Miserables was completed 155 years ago today.

Anyone want to celebrate with a victor-hugo question?

Maybe. I never got around to finishing Les Mis; the super lengthy tangents were annoyingly distracting from the story. (I still plan on finishing it some day). Maybe I'll ask this question but for Les Mis.

Never mind. Asked and answered.

4:05 PM

@Shokhet You mean this question? :-)

Jinx! :)

@Peter hate Gatsby but the book sounds very helpful. Looking it up right now.

@Peter great, thank you?

@Shokhet Forgot to link to literature.stackexchange.com/a/2883/481 :p

@Hamlet What do you think of Peter's answer to your "broken images" question? It gives a plausible (and very interesting!) interpretation, but without doing much to justify that interpretation from the text itself and without a single quote from the poem.

(To be clear, I'm not at all saying it's a bad answer! I think it's better and more interesting than mine. But after you said mine doesn't have solid enough textual confirmation, I'm curious whether you agree that this answer with almost no textual confirmation is better, and if so why.)

5:03 PM

#OnThisDay 155 years ago, #VictorHugo completed #LesMiserables. Come browse our existing Q's, or ask your own! https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/les-miserables

Tweeted by StackLiterature on June 30, 2017 at 4:11 PM

5:31 PM

@Randal'Thor Well, it's not a great answer, and it probably could be improved by talking about the text itself.

At the same time, this answer is not a close reading answer like your answer was. It uses a different methodology. It is essentially summarizing the research other scholars have conducted on the poem.

So the answer should be judged on the basis of how well it explains the views of the scholars who study the poem. And in my view, it explains these views well enough to merit an upvote. But I don't think it's a great (e.g. bounty worthy) answer.

How about the third (or rather first) answer? You said you downvoted it because it was just two quotes; if it had spent more time on exploring those analyses, or at least summarised them in its own words, would you have considered it an OK answer despite not being 'original' as such?

(I seem to recall you saying that what we should be doing on this site is reading and analysing works ourselves rather than using existing analyses as sources. But perhaps it wasn't you or I'm misremembering.)

@Randal'Thor Yes, exactly. You need to state things in your own words. You need to understand and explain, you can't just copy and paste.

@Randal'Thor no, I said that, and I stand by that. Let me explain.

When this site started out I made a conscious decision not to encourage people to write these kinds of answers. There are two reasons for this. First, the community when we started out had only one person with expert knowledge. If you don't have expert knowledge, at best people will just copy and paste things from books without understanding it. At worst, people won't know the difference between scholarly analysis and something on sparknotes.

Oh, and thanks for the 9-grid tweet, @Shokhet!

5:46 PM

@Hamlet If you're using someone else's analysis, one could argue that it's better to present it directly in its original form than to put it in your own words as if it's your analysis. I at least wouldn't presume to think that I could express a literary criticism better than the academic who originally wrote it.

Rewriting in one's own words can aid one's own understanding, true. But it's the reader's understanding which is really important, both from the point of view of answering the OP's question and from that of providing a resource for the wider internet. And is it easier to read and comprehend an analysis written by a literary scholar or by an enthusiastic amateur based on the former?

@Randal'Thor Second, explaining other people's ideas isn't very fulfilling. It gets boring. We tried the "cite academic sources" thing over at mythology, and people left because they got tired of it. Coming up with your own interpretations is much more fulfilling.

(Of course, this is all generalities - some academics can't write for toffees, and some amateurs are the most eloquent people you'll ever meet. But still.)

@Hamlet True. But if we're going to compare with other SEs ... well, most answers on SFF are based on quotes, and that site is still doing well.

ducks :-P

Third, we are a bunch of beginners. People are going to write wrong answers. If its an answer summarizing a scholarly work, a wrong answer is essentially worthless. But if its an answer explaining one's own interpretation of a poem, well, even a wrong answer is interesting. It's always interesting to read someone's personal interpretation of a poem.

@Randal'Thor Academic writing isn't written for the same audience that would be reading our questions.

6:04 PM

@Gallifreyan Oh, my pleasure :)

And of course, what do you do if there's a question that gasp scholars haven't gotten around to answering? You need to learn methods like close reading.

@Hamlet More good points :-)

But if you're going to paraphrase someone else's analysis, I think you should at least quote some relevant portions of it, even if you rewrite it in your own words as well?

user15026

@Randal'Thor well, if we're going by academic style referencing, paraphrasing is okay AS LONG AS there is still proper referencing back to the original source

@Hamlet I appreciate your take on my Eliot response and your conviction for close reading.

With my more formal training in Literature, I tend to go more abstract/theoretical since that's what grad school was about. Close readings are a dime a dozen for famous works, so the challenge was seeing this readings through new theoretical lenses.

I had to engage with the text by interpreting other interpretations, not just the text itself.

@Randal'Thor what Ash said.

6:15 PM

That said, I applaud the effort to strengthen the ability for others to perform close readings because that is the foundation of it all. </end>

@Peter An ending tag for end? Does that mean it's the end of the end?

Just that my brief rant was over :)

@Peter not sure if you used a lens. It seemed to me like you were just summarizing other's arguments about the original text.

@Ash OK. So it's fine to post an answer which is based off someone else's analysis but all written in your own words and with a link at the end?

Partially. It's how I see it too. The text is self-referential. It is the heap of broken images. I essentially situate within the movement of modernism and its focus on the fracturing of self/identity.

6:20 PM

I may want to edit a few of my answers then :-)

@Peter I know that there are things other than close reading out there. And a poem like The Waste Land needs more than just close reading to really be interpreted properly. I'm just obsessed with close reading now because, well, people on the site need to at least know close reading if this site will have any chance of being useful. For what its worth I upvoted your answer BTW.

@Peter To put it another way, your answer is correct. I'm just not sure if it constitutes original research/interpretation, which is what I really value in answers. But again, I upvoted it.

@Hamlet That makes a lot of sense. If you really want to explore the depths of The Waste Land, look for the Norton Critical Edition. It's worth owning if you like the poem.

@Hamlet Fair enough. It absolutely does not. It's more how I've been trained to read modernist literature, not my new reading thereof.

@Peter which is perfectly valid!

(for context, I've cast 503 downvotes and 301 upvotes).

Wow. That's an impressive ratio for assuring quality.

1 hour later…

8:01 PM

0

Q: "wind" or "wind"? re: Little Gidding, II.50

yet the words sufficed To compel the recognition they preceded. And so, compliant to the common wind, Too strange to each other for misunderstanding, In concord at this intersection time Of meeting nowhere, no before and after, We trod the pavement in a dead patrol. I as...

t-s-eliot four-quartets

3 hours later…

11:24 PM

@Randal'Thor oh: one very important point: it's not enough to say "Professor X says A means B." You have to explain why "Professor X says A means B.", i.e. the arguments Professor X uses. Which Peter's answer does, but which other answers that cite scholarly sources do not.

Oh, definitely. We've been through the whole "an answer from a professor isn't good just because they're a professor, but they should have the expertise to properly explain their reasoning" thing on meta.

Hmm. I should reread the meta about answers from authors, to see if I want to change any of my votes.

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Jun '1730

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