The Reading Room

12:10 AM

@Mithical It might not have gotten 5 million answers in a week. But it also wasn't quite shunted away by the collective institutional racism Mr. Kal assumes his hypothetical question to get treated with either.

If anything, you certainly tried. And gave the site unanimously appreciated content in doing so.

b_jonas

2:02 AM

@Mithical Wait really?

At some point I was wondering if David Morgan-Mar's Irregular Webcomic was all on-topic on Sci Fi SE, or only the majority of themes that are based on sci-fi or fantasy are, but I never thought of whether they count as Literature.

Ideally I should test these experimentally by asking good questions about all those borderline cases.

Also, ever since I pushed on Sci Fi to close that question about Jules Verne's "Around the world in 80 days", I feel guilty. I should have let it left open, but it's probably too late to change it now.

Well not really, I think my guilt started like a year or two later.

Oh, and ideally I (or someone else) should update the Order of the Stick question about Vaarsuvius's gender (on Sci Fi SE) with the new relevant information that wasn't available yet when I posted the original answer. But the current answer is much more complicated.

Rand al'Thor

7:58 AM

@EddieKal Interesting. I can't really advise since policies on how to handle that kind of post are going to vary a lot from site to site, but I'll link you to a meta thread on similar issues at SFF. The consensus in the end was that on-topicness trumps ick-factor, although we can and should edit out any unnecessary prurience. But you'll find a lot of different points of view represented in the comments and various answers there.

For this kind of thing it's really good to have a clear meta policy, IMO, no matter which way it goes. If there's a clear policy to close such questions, then people can freely vote to close without being accused of excessive prudishness. If there's a clear policy to allow them, then people can freely vote to leave open without being accused of creating an X-rated site.

Bookworm

11:31 AM

0

Q: How does Mérimée's Carmen mix the genres classical tragedy, romantic drama and picaresque novel?

Prosper Mérimée's novella Carmen (1845/1847) is best known as the source for George Bizet's opera Carmen (1875). The French Wikipedia article about the novella contains the following unsourced statement: Dans Carmen, Mérimée mêle les genres de la tragédie classique, du drame romantique et du rom...

Rand al'Thor

@EddieKal I don't really know ELU policy on what to push to ELL vs just close, but as a lone close voter I tend to VTC if it's some really basic thing that anyone could know just by learning / looking up the English phrase, like "is it 'what's that suppose to mean' or 'what's that supposed to mean'?", and VTM if it has some nuance or interesting facet of the language that would be helpful to many non-native speakers, like this for instance.

Rand al'Thor

11:50 AM

@EddieKal Very eloquent, and very decent, emphasising kindness and patience and always thinking of the personal aspects of SE (e.g. helping people as well as just building a repository of knowledge). That same user was a pro-tem mod and founding light on two of my main SE sites. Every so often I come across an old chat message or meta post and think "wow damn, that's a lot of wisdom lost from SE debates".

Rand al'Thor

12:33 PM

@Mithical The best response you got was, unsurprisingly, the comment from BESW :-)

Gareth Rees

1:09 PM

@EddieKal Literary theory is on topic here at Literature.se, but you need to set your expectations realistically — this site is part of Stack Exchange, and so the audience consists mainly of computer programmers who read a book once, and not of Literature post-grads.

Mithical

@Randal'Thor Even better was the chat discussion that led to the question. ;)

Gareth Rees

@EddieKal The situation with respect to homework questions is very different on Literature.se compared to, say, Math.se. On Math.se it's quite easy to turn a homework question into a question that will fly on Stack Exchange: all you have to do is to strip the "show that" or "prove that" wording.

But on Literature.se homework questions tend to be unanswerable within the Stack Exchange system. They are designed to be open-ended in order to give students a chance to show their knowledge of the text. But open-ended questions are generally too broad to attract answers here. This means we can afford to be relaxed about them.

Here's a typical example of a question that comes from a school essay prompt — you'll see that the OP has little chance of getting what they want from us.

Napoleon Wilson

2:37 PM

@Randal'Thor I still hope that didn't intimidate people away from answering, though.

Transcript for