The Reading Room - 2018-08-17

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10:57 AM

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Q: What was the earliest diary by a European poet, dramatist or novelist?

The earliest surviving diary by a poet is probably the Tosa Diary by the tenth-century Japanese poet Ki no Tsurayuki. More details about this diary can be found on the Diary Review blog. The Diary Review blog has several blog posts about European diaries from the 1500s and earlier, but none of ...

history-of-literature diary

4 hours later…

Christophe Strobbe

3:10 PM

I've proposed another non-Western author for the reading challenges. This time it's the Indian author Premchand. Well-known in India, extremely obscure in the West. I think there are sufficient translations, though; I listed a few in the proposal.

New Topic Challenge Suggestion

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A: Suggest your Lit.SE reading challenges here!

Author challenge: Munshi Premchand (Dhanpat Rai Shrivastava) Since this site needs more questions about non-Western literature, here is another author challenge. Munshi Premchand (1880 – 1936) is not well known in the West, even though he "is regarded as one of the foremost Hindi writers of the ...

2 hours later…

5:00 PM

user image

@Shokhet I briefly downvoted you just to get this screenshot, and then reversed my downvote :-)

@Napoleon Saw your comment - good point. The two siblings seem to use quite different dialects, and that ties into the differences in their characters, which may also have something to do with the choice of pronouns.

Napoleon Wilson

I have to admit I don't quite get what you're on about the pronouns specifically there.

A lot of stories would use a different technique for viewpoint-switching like this: e.g. italics for one character's PoV and normal text for the other. Switching pronouns is an interesting choice, and I wonder if there's an apt reason behind it.

Napoleon Wilson

What exctly do you mean with pronoun switching?

Maybe I should read the question again.

Christophe Strobbe

That question is on my to-do lists. The use of pronouns is unusual there. I wonder if the online version of that story accidentally omitted italics that were present in the original version.

@NapoleonWilson Or read the story again? ;-)

Napoleon Wilson

5:05 PM

@Randal'Thor I just did.

The Caliban parts are written using second-person narration, which is unusual in itself outside of very specific "write your own adventure" genres.

Napoleon Wilson

Wait, it seems you're primarily after the difference between 2nd and 1st person.

The Ariel parts are written using first-person narration, which throws the reader off-balance at first since there's no clear signal that the PoV character has even shifted.

Napoleon Wilson

I guess I was confused by the word "pronoun" and was more thinking about actual pronoun words, rather than the entire conjugation(?).

Well, the pronoun changing itself is the clearest signal. But subtle and easy to miss.

Napoleon Wilson

5:06 PM

The question makes more sense now.

Christophe Strobbe

Remember the first sentence of Calvino's novel If on a winter's night a traveler? It went as follows: "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought."

Napoleon Wilson

Though, my answer would likely have concentrated more on the pidgin language, the use if which seems clearer, than the conjugation. That...stays a mystery indeed (which is probably why you asked for that rather than the language change in the first place).

Christophe Strobbe

Not that it is relevant to Hopkinson's story, but it's an original way of starting a novel.

5:29 PM

Better than "it was a dark and stormy night" ;-)

Christophe Strobbe

It's a postmodern novel, and I believe many (all?) chapters were some kind of pastiche of a literary genre. (I read the book 23 years ago, so my recollections may be inaccurate.)

Napoleon Wilson

Seeing the strong issues of racial identity and the idea that those are all just different facettes of the protagonist (which would also speak against a more visual differentiating between the characters, like italics), one might be led to think the different pronouns to denote different levels of distance/identification with the respective facettes.

But it's hard to reason about this without entirely grasping the exact nature of the racial conflicts adressed there, beyond just a fuzzy impression.

@NapoleonWilson Oh, that's a very interesting thought. Like the so-called irregular verbs - "I'm being diplomatic, you're bending the truth, he/she's a liar" - which also use different pronouns to denote different levels of distance.

Christophe Strobbe

This Medium article quotes Calvino: How to Write a Captivating Opening Paragraph that Hooks Readers.

Where do you see the idea that those are all just different facettes of the protagonist? Is it something you came up with, or has it been written before?

Napoleon Wilson

5:39 PM

I just made it up. Maybe by looking too much for more than just a fantasy short story. ;-) But the underlying racial conflicts are quite palpable, even if I admittedly don't get their entire background completely.

And the whole deal with "who are you?" at the end points to an identity conflict within the protagonist.

I'm actually planning to ask another question based on some of the racial issues.

@NapoleonWilson Oooh, good point.

Napoleon Wilson

He's basically a "mixed-race" person (for lack of a better term) looking for an identity and maybe all too often searching for it in what others see in him.

Ha! I bountied that Pearl S. Buck question months ago, and it even got tweeted, but only now does it get an answer.

Napoleon Wilson

Maybe some of those ramblings might indeed by construable into a talk about the pronouns. I'll just mull over this...or lean back and look forward to Christophe's answer. ;-)

5:59 PM

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Q: Seeing the Relationship between Heart of Darkness and Taylor Swift's "Wildest Dreams" Song

I always thought that Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad was anti-colonialism. Taylor Swift's "Wildest Dreams" song was filmed in Africa. The money the music video based on the son raised went out to feed animals rather than humans of Africa. Although the music video by Taylor Swift, an American ...

heart-of-darkness racism

6:14 PM

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Q: What does "mannered whimsy" mean?

What does "mannered whimsy" mean in the following passage taken from Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England by Sophie Read? Marvel does, it is true, come off better from this particular comparison: Crashaw's little bit of mannered whimsy cannot compete with the liqui...

6:54 PM

@Christophe Excellent answer!

Christophe Strobbe

7:05 PM

Heh,thanks.

@Randal'Thor By the way, the song-lyrics tag is irrelevant to the Taylor Swift question. I checked the text; there is not a single reference to Africa, nature, skin colour, colonialism etc. It's just a silly love song. The colonialism issue only applies to the video itself.

Oh OK. I just added it because it's the only tag we have for songs, but fair enough, probably should be removed then.

Btw, typo "belong too" in your latest answer.

You and Gareth deserve medals for sniping all these old unanswered questions so well :-)

Christophe Strobbe

Thanks. I also noticed another typo :blush:

Well, I think there are revival badges for that :-)

The music video for Wildest Dreams reminded me of a distorted parody of Out of Africa. Then Wikipedia says that Out of Africa and The English Patient were sources of inspiration.

It made me think of neocolonialism and then I found I wasn't the only one.

7:29 PM

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Q: Why is the colour of Caliban's girls important?

I recently read Nalo Hopkinson's short story "Shift", which is freely available online. The central character is a reimagining of Shakespeare's Caliban, a Caribbean black man who finds white women to turn him into whatever they want him to be. For some reason, it seems only white women ("golden g...

short-stories nalo-hopkinson

@Bookworm Idea: should we replace the racism tag with something more general like race-issues?

I mean, we have a tag for lgbt not homophobia.

Damn, I'm on 22225 rep ... not sure if I can find three answers to downvote.

Christophe Strobbe

8:01 PM

Tsk, tsk, downvoting without a good reason should be frowned upon!

But replacing racism with race-issues makes sense.

Well, I'd reverse the downvotes after taking a screenshot ;-)

Christophe Strobbe

I know, I know.

More evidence that you can't read too much Shakespeare. Searching "not one but" in a digital Shakespeare edition gives no results, but I knew I had seen that usage of "but" somewhere in Shakespeare.

Twenty years after reading All's Well That Ends Well in four editions in parallel (Penguin, Arden, Oxford, Cambridge).

Christophe Strobbe

8:22 PM

@Randal'Thor 22,240 reps. Looks like you missed the opportunity?

Yeah. Never mind though.

Maybe I'll set another bounty and get back there ;-)

Christophe Strobbe

@Randal'Thor LOL!

I wanted to give you a bounty for the Rousseau answer, but I'm trying to prioritise sub-4k users if possible.

Btw, that question needs new tags, if you want to get closer to a Refiner badge @Christophe :-)

Christophe Strobbe

I'll look into it.

Christophe Strobbe

8:52 PM

Done.

1 hour later…

10:09 PM

Would it be worth pinging Nalo Hopkinson on Twitter with links to individual (unanswered) questions about her stories?

Best-case scenario, she joins the site and answers them. Worst-case scenario, she gets fed up with the pings and blocks StackLiterature.

11:01 PM

@Randal'Thor ... and the culprit gets banned from the Reading Room forever ^_^

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