The Reading Room

North Læraðr

00:09

@Randal'Thor Updated asnswer for literature.stackexchange.com/questions/14961/…

Bookworm

1

Q: Tale of a Dog Chasing the Sun/Trying to Find Its Owner?

So during the Korean Folktale Topic Challenge, I was actually searching for a specific story that I thought was associated with a mythical beast called "Haetchi" or a "Haetae". It's been a while, and I may be confusing the story with the story of the "Bulgae". The basic premise of the story is a ...

Tsundoku

00:28

@Bookworm So the Korean reading challenge continues ....

North Læraðr

@Tsundoku I'll make it live :P

Nah it's a question I've been meaning to post for a while but then school started and I became super busy

Tsundoku

02:16

This question about homology in Lucien Goldmann's genetic structuralism has been undeleted four times. Now at last it has an answer.

Tsundoku

03:03

Found this in the Linguistics SE chatroom: I’ve discovered that almost every single article on the Scots version of Wikipedia is written by the same person - an American teenager who can’t speak Scots (Reddit post).

That guy has made at least 200,000 edits on the Scots Wikipedia. That's more edits than we will have for how many decades?

Apparently, a lot has happened since that post on Reddit.

Mithical

07:56

Handy for tracking Socratic badges if you've already gotten (at least) one.

Bookworm

0

Q: What does the line about the Tower of Babel mean in Ishay Ribo's "Keter Melucha"?

In Ishay Ribo's song "Keter Melucha / כתר מלוכה" (Royal Crown), a song written about, essentially, COVID and lockdown, there's a line that goes like this: בין ויקהל לפקודי אין איש בעיר ובשדה כבר אין מול מי להתנהל מגדל בבל שוב מתבלבל Between Vayakhel and Pekudei1 There's no person in the city or ...

song-lyrics hebrew-literature ishay-ribo

Eddie Kal

08:12

@Tsundoku Two answers.

This question is a good one, because it introduces to this site a new perspective. I did some superficial digging on Lit SE and it seems most methodological discussions here have centered on "close reading", "authorial intent". To be clear, those are from only one camp of literary analysis. There are many other strains of thought out there.

People like Goldmann and Lukacs show us a whole new world with ideas not concerned with the details or intent.

Bookworm

08:50

0

Q: literary value and value added by me worth US DOLLARS

What I have sent information which can be valued at RS/-117000.00 to the US. Many novels, stories can be written in ENGLISH and other western languages. can my contribution be termed as a success in literature?Or am I helping the police?

william-shakespeare history-of-literature agatha-christie

Mithical

wat

Mithical

10:17

@EddieKal would you be interested in writing an answer to literature.stackexchange.com/q/3500/58 by any chance?

@NorthLæraðr the-fall-of-the-house-of-usher

ishay-ribo

@Bookworm I'll write an answer to this tonight if nobody beats me to it.

Tsundoku

13:17

@EddieKal So now we have to complementary answers :-) You may want to move the part about "vision du monde" to a question specifically about that concept.

@Mithical Are you learning Dutch? ;-)

@EddieKal The lion's share of theory questions in the first year of this site's existence were posted by Hamlet/111. After that, many other questions in this area were posted by (presumably) students who didn't understand specific technical terms they encountered in their textbooks or lectures.

There are very few active users on this site who have read more than just the occasional introduction to literary theory.

@Mithical Isn't that just a short story rather than a book-length work?

@EddieKal I fully agree, which is why I want to increase interest in literary theory by posting this topic challenge suggestion. That suggestion recommends two books that can provoke many new questions.

Rand al'Thor

15:04

@EddieKal I left manga because it's a pre-existing tag, without judging which genre fits that question better, but the meta discussion went towards abolishing genre tags altogether, so at some point we should do the work to eliminate or merge a bunch of such tags.

@NorthLæraðr Given its usage predominantly on ID questions, I suspect the time-travel tag may have been used by people more familiar with SFF where ID questions frequently have tags for associated tropes/concepts. Time travel is an important concept in sci-fi, worth its own tag there; not so much in literature. I'd say we don't need a tag for it here.

Tsundoku

@Randal'Thor How do we deal with it? Edit it out of those questions? (Or merge into story-ID?)

I have just now removed it from my own question, so now all questions tagged time-travel also have story-identification.

Rand al'Thor

@EddieKal Close reading and authorial intent were two topics that Hamlet/111 specifically made a lot of effort to educate the community about. (You'll see if you search this chatroom for those phrases.) We haven't had many users with real expertise in literary theory, so the range of theories and methodologies examined here may be a bit narrow.

@Mithical short-stories ;-)

@Tsundoku Oh good, then we can do a simple merge without needing to bump all those old questions by editing.

@Tsundoku Huh, why was that one so poorly received? Even before your rewrite to improve the question, all those downvotes and close-votes seem a bit harsh.

Tsundoku

15:19

Well, the original version was really very short and asked to explain three terms at once. Perhaps those downvoters thought it exhibit a lack of effort. (Though internet searches for these terms are not very helpful.)

It's an example of what happens if people lazily downvote instead of suggesting improvements, thereby helping neither the question owner nor the site ...

That user is probably not coming back to our site.

Since the reboot of the topic challenges, we haven't had any challenges that ended without questions. The lowest number of questions since the reboot is 2 (for Lin Yutang).

Hi @Gallifreyan! Haven't seen you here for a while.

Gallifreyan

15:37

It's been a hectic summer, as opposed to my usual summers

Tsundoku

I see. I'm on vacation at the moment. One more week before the craziness begins again ;-)

Bookworm

16:16

0

Q: Narration and internal dialogue in Mansfield's The Little Governess

I'm a newbie in literary reading and I'm confused about narration. I have read Katherine Mansfield's short story The Little Governess, which is written in third person narration. But I am confused about the following sentence: I wish it wasn't night time. I wish there was another woman in the ca...

short-stories narrator katherine-mansfield

Gallifreyan

16:36

@Tsundoku Yep,the real craziness is only getting started.

Eddie Kal

17:07

@Randal'Thor I think genre tags could be helpful for search purposes, but I am also in favor of doing away with all the genre tags if they will be gone completely without bias. In general it is a good trend to acknowledge the lines between genres are blurry and random.

@NorthLæraðr Have there been discussions about specific theory tags?

Rand al'Thor

17:40

@Gallifreyan My summer's been much less hectic than usual, thanks to corona. Normally I'd be travelling a lot for conferences and visits and so on, but now everything's cancelled or postponed or online.

@Brahadeesh Glad to see you're still around making edits! I saw your profile text and was afraid we'd seen the last of you for a while.

user185131

Hi Rand! I've been getting a bit stressed out with my PhD and SE had become a great way to procrastinate and not think about the problems I need to deal with :P So, I just decided to step away for a small while to sort things out.

user185131

I might not be around much for the next couple of weeks too, but I want to be back sooner rather than later :)

Rand al'Thor

Using SE to procrastinate during a maths PhD? I've been there :-P

Good luck with all your sorting out!

user185131

Hehehe :P Thank you, I think by the end of the month a lot of things will get smoothened out.....in the short term.

Eddie Kal

@Brahadeesh A long-time ELL contributor used to do the same during his PhD final stage. And I wondered why he hadn't gotten his PhD after 18 years.

That's me saying: Good luck!

user185131

17:48

@EddieKal That's...terrifying! And in a way, great motivation for me too XD Thank you :)

Rand al'Thor

@EddieKal Hopefully not another Ted Streleski ...

@Tsundoku Posts in the Twitter Control Room need to be starred to be automatically tweeted. (As a mod you can star your own posts by abusing the pin/unpin feature.) That's why this didn't get tweeted. (I just starred it now; hopefully the script detects older messages wih recent stars.)

Eddie Kal

@Randal'Thor Ben would be the last person to go bonkers

wiki.c2.com/?BenKovitz

> Wales and Sanger discussed various ways to create content more rapidly. The idea of a wiki-based complement originated from a conversation between Larry M. Sanger and Ben Kovitz. Ben Kovitz was a computer programmer and regular on Ward Cunningham's revolutionary wiki "the WikiWikiWeb". He explained to Sanger what wikis were, at that time a difficult concept to understand, over a dinner on Tuesday 2 January 2001.

History of Wikipedia

Wikipedia began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Its technological and conceptual underpinnings predate this; the earliest known proposal for an online encyclopedia was made by Rick Gates in 1993, and the concept of a free-as-in-freedom online encyclopedia (as distinct from mere open source) was proposed by Richard Stallman in December 2000.Crucially, Stallman's concept specifically included the idea that no central organization should control editing. This characteristic greatly contrasted with contemporary digital...

Apparently community projects like Wikipedia and Stack Exchange suck the life out of you...

Oh btw I am posting these here only because Ben uses his real name and talks about his life on SE

Rand al'Thor

18:15

@EddieKal Oh wow, sort of an internet celebrity then.

North Læraðr

18:33

@EddieKal Kind of. Not much

@Mithical There's no question attached to that tag

Mithical

18:49

@NorthLæraðr it got removed

North Læraðr

@Mithical I can attempt it... not that it'll be good

@Mithical Ah...

Mithical

Heh... currently in the middle of writing an answer ;)

North Læraðr

oh whatever, I gotta create a tag excerpt for Katherine Mansfield anyways

Who knows maybe I'll throw my two sents in :P

Mithical

Oh, great

My computer entirely crashed and died while I was writing the answer

It autosaved. :)

Tsundoku

19:07

David Heska Wanbli Weiden: Seven Essential Native American Crime Novels, September 2020.

2

North Læraðr

19:51

@Mithical I think I’ll write an answer for that in a couple days

I disagree with what people say abt musuc

I’ll elaborate more in the answer, but it depends on the piece of music

Lyrics are unanimously agreed as fitting under the scope of this site

However, there’s a type of music which in fact has all the elements of story telling except for verbal dialouge

Tchaikovsky is the most famous with his “Nutcracker Suite” and the Swan Lake Ballet Suite thingy, but both these pieces of music have their share of plot and characters

You can definitely ask something like “How does X character in Swan Lake. etc. etc.” and it’d be valid in my opinion

Any other form of music which doesn’t have a clear plot I’d say no. Bc there’s nothing in which to dissect that’d represent literature

Aside from you know lyric analysis

Tsundoku

20:11

@NorthLæraðr Bear in mind that that question is not about site scope (it's not on meta) but about whether music actually is literature.

Bookworm

20:23

0

Q: Who was the first scholar who claimed that the Ur-Hamlet was influenced by the German play Der bestrafte Brudermord?

Thomas Kyd (1558—1594) is best known as the author of The Spanish Tragedy, a play that shares several similarities with Shakespeare's Hamlet. These similarities include a ghost demanding vengeance, a play-within-the-play used to trap the (suspected) murderer and (feigned or real) madness. Kyd is ...

inspiration thomas-kyd ur-hamlet der-bestrafte-brudermord

North Læraðr

@Tsundoku ah ok

b_jonas

@NorthLæraðr Would musicfans.stackexchange.com/q/3425/1602 be on topic here?

Tsundoku

21:08

@b_jonas Based on the current site scope, I don't see very well how we could fit in that question here.

Rand al'Thor

Re music as literature, we have this question (which was closed as off-topic then reopened, back in 2017):

3

Q: In Peter and the Wolf, why is Peter represented by a String quartet?

Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf is a combination of a children's story and a musical composition. A narrator narrates the story while an orchestra plays the corresponding music. According to the English translation of the performance instructions: Each character of this tale is represe...

music peter-and-the-wolf sergei-prokofiev

Tsundoku

21:25

returns to his books.

Transcript for