The Reading Room

2:16 AM

@GarethRees Yes, I spent some time yesterday looking through the list of unanswered questions. I agree that many of them aren't worth engaging with, but isn't there some guideline that says that in order to grow up and become an alpha site, we have to limit the number of unanswered qs to some percentage?

Bookworm

4:45 AM

0

Q: What does Mr Darcy mean by this

"there is meanness in all the arts which ladies sometimes condescend to employ for captivation. Whatever bears affinity to cunning is despicable

Rand al'Thor

7:09 AM

@verbose Not really, no. Criteria have changed a lot, but nowadays it seems that either questions-per-day or simply site age are the main requirements.

I'm still really happy to see old unanswered questions being given good answers, though :-)

Btw, 6000 rep exactly, nice.

verbose

7:39 AM

@Randal'Thor Wal, then, Randolph, you'll love my latest effort, since it answers a question you asked some months ago. 'Course it exemplifies my typical concision and economy of expression, and we already know you find my answers too long to read, so you'll prolly never get around to reading it. 🙃

Eng Lit Learner

0

Q: Meaning of "to have been stifled by the stand he'd taken"

She it was, Heloise insisted, who drew attention to the house, but her husband doubted it. He reminded her that what had been attempted at Lahardane was part of a pattern that was repeated all over Ireland. The nature of the house, the possession of land even though it had dwindled, the family’s...

meaning-in-context phrase-meaning literature

Bookworm

0

Q: Exploring the Elements of Heteroglossia in the Semiotic Novels of Umberto Eco

Heteroglossia is an interesting and thoughtful literary term introduced by the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin in his “Discourse in the Novel” in 1934. Heteroglossia describes the coexistence of varieties within a single “linguistic code”. Bakhtin argues that the power of the novel originates in...

literary-criticism umberto-eco literary-theory-an-introduction literary-theory-short-introduction mikhail-bakhtin

verbose

In other news, I emulated @GarethRees and drew up my own list of questions that I'd like to see answered. The bulk of them, I intend to work on at some point unless someone else answers them first. (I'm not claiming dibs.)

Some of them already have good answers, but I'm vain enough to think I might have something to add 😐

Rand al'Thor

7:57 AM

@verbose I hate to break that perfect 6000 score, but had to upvote that answer.

It sidesteps or frame-challenges the question slightly, but I was expecting that. Asking about the "original version" of the Iliad and Odyssey is perhaps begging the question :-)

verbose

8:16 AM

@Randal'Thor reframing questions so I can answer them the way I want is my bag, yo. Just like asking “what was the first work to do X?” Is @Tsundoku’s

Rand al'Thor

Oh btw:

> an anonymous contributor, let's call him the ~~Great~~ melancholy Dane

verbose

@Randal'Thor you upvoted without reading? That answer is mega long even by my standards

Rand al'Thor

Is hilarious, but I think a misidentification.

user111 was Hamlet, not user80.

verbose

@Randal'Thor Oh k. I’ll edit unless you beat me to it. I’m on my phone and not my computer rn so I don’t want to fuck with it rn

thanks for the tip

Rand al'Thor

@verbose Your iambic pentameter answer is mega long (and still open in one of my tabs). The Iliad/Odyssey one is more manageable, and I read fast.

Btw, I wonder how much sense it even makes to use the homer tag on Iliad and Odyssey questions? He's not really the "author" in the sense that, say, Tolkien is the author of LotR or Austen is the author of P&P.

verbose

8:36 AM

@Randal'Thor it’s useful shorthand, and people will search by that tag, so ....

Eng Lit Learner

8:57 AM

0

Q: Meaning of "the sense of family"

They knew each other well, the Captain and his wife. They had in common a certain way of life, an order of priorities and concerns. Their shared experience of death when they were young had drawn them close and in their marriage had made precious for them the sense of family that the birth of a ...

phrase-meaning literature

Bookworm

1

Q: What does Norton Juster mean by this in 'The Phantom Tollbooth'?

What does he mean by; You can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and still come out completely dry. Most people do. What does he associate with 'knowledge' using the imagery of staying 'dry' after a swim?

norton-juster the-phantom-tollbooth

Tsundoku

9:43 AM

@Bookworm "Can the Odyssey be consumed independently of the Iliad?" By readers or by fire? Asking on behalf or Ray Bradbury ;-)

@Bookworm First question in the literary theory challenge, by @EJoshuaS, who was the first to propose a literary theory challenge.

Bookworm

0

Q: What does the Whether Man teach Milo in "The Phantom Tollbooth"?

Everything in the Lands Beyond teaches Milo something, so his first encounter, the Whether Man, what does he teach Milo? Milo confuses the 'Whether' man with the 'Weather' man, when he introduces himself. and then it is followed by a question from the Whether man about the weather, then followed ...

symbolism the-phantom-tollbooth norton-juster

Tsundoku

@PrinceNorthLæraðr Lots of new tags for you :-)

verbose

@Tsundoku a goat could consume the Odyssey independently of the Iliad

Tsundoku

@verbose I thought it was cats or dogs that ate people's homework, but goats?

Mithical

12:50 PM

@Bookworm Handy example: the Internet

2

b_jonas

1:02 PM

@Tsundoku Cats? I haven't heard of a cat eating a homework.

Goat sounds more realistic actually.

Cats have better taste than to eat paper.

@Randal'Thor He is the author in the sense that he's the author listed in library catalogs by tradition.

Rand al'Thor

@Mithical I love The Phantom Tollbooth. Did a re-read just a couple of months ago, but there's still new things to discover and understand.

b_jonas

It may be silly, but if he's shown as the author, then it's reasonable to search for him when you want to find tags.

Rand al'Thor

@b_jonas Yep, same point verbose made. Useful by convention if not necessarily by accuracy.

Gareth Rees

I don't see what is inaccurate about it.

Rand al'Thor

Might be worth making a note in the tag wiki though, if only to show that the Lit.SE community is serious enough to know better than "Homer wrote the Iliad, it's his story".

Gareth Rees

1:09 PM

I don't think we do know better than that

The point is that although there is a lot of evidence that the Homeric epics derive from a long oral tradition, we don't know how the oral tradition came to be fixed in writing, or what fraction of the text comes from what source. What we know is entirely consistent with "Homer" (meaning the person who fixed the text) composing the majority of it

b_jonas

There's still a problem with how to spell his name and the title of his works … I've had a long debate about that back years ago.

Debate about the title, that is, not about the author's name.

Rand al'Thor

Probably you know more about this than me, but I've gathered the impression that to speak about an "author" of the Iliad and Odyssey is almost meaningless.

There seems to be much less evidence for one person behind the fixed/written version than with, say, the Shahnameh, which was also a long-lasting oral tradition but was written down in poetic form by Ferdowsi.

Gareth Rees

@Randal'Thor There are a range of theories and the evidence simply does not exist to distinguish between them.

Possibly the Iliad was passed down orally in its entirety and some scribe wrote it down in the 8th century without contributing anything. Or possibly some person (maybe even someone named "Homer") composed an original epic, basing it on episodes and fragments from oral tradition. Or somewhere between these extremes. We simply don't know.

b_jonas

1:26 PM

@Randal'Thor Yes. There's also a tradition for that. Lönnrot is considered the editor of the Kalevala, not the author, even if he wrote a lot of lines in it. But Bartók is considered to be the author of Székelyfonó. I don't understand enough to know how exactly this works.

Rand al'Thor

@GarethRees For that matter, where does the name "Homer", and the association of that name with the Iliad and Odyssey, originally come from?

I guess that would be a good new question for the site, since this existing Q&A doesn't quite address it.

Tsundoku

@b_jonas Yes, cats tend to eat loose papter they can find, or at least parts of it.

b_jonas

@Tsundoku I see.

Maybe I just haven't heard of it because my brother and his wife are doctors so they don't tend to have papers related to their work loose at home, they are handling sensitive data and mostly on computer, unlike us mathematicians.

Gareth Rees

@Randal'Thor The authorship of these works was clearly common knowledge in ancient Greece, for example Aristotle says, "Homer is pre-eminent among poets, for he alone combined dramatic form with excellence of imitation, so he too first laid down the main lines of Comedy, by dramatising the ludicrous instead of writing personal satire. His Margites bears the same relation to Comedy that the Iliad and Odyssey do to Tragedy."

Rand al'Thor

For mathematicians:
- I locked my homework in a box, but a four-dimensional dog got in and ate it.
- I stored my homework inside a Klein bottle, but it fell out from the outside.

Tsundoku

1:37 PM

@Randal'Thor In the context of tagging on our website, I'm not sure we need to interpret author only as proven authorship. For texts from Antiquity, there are many uncertain and pseudonymous authors, who are sometimes given names such as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Pseudo-Ezekiel, etc.

Gareth Rees

You can find references to Homer in many other ancient authors, for example Herodotus, Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon, etc.

CowperKettle

2:04 PM

The first man who received the covid vaccine in the UK was William Shakespeare, aged 91

Bookworm

0

Q: What does the window exhort bacteria to do in "what "doing what the window exhorts"?

An excerpt from "Molecular Evolution" by Tina Hesman Saey: Inside the lab, a dozen glass flasks containing clear liquid swirl in a temperature-controlled incubator. Although the naked eye can't see them, millions of E. coli bacteria grow in the flasks, doing what the window exhorts. Lenski start...

meaning

Gareth Rees

2:32 PM

@Bookworm I edited this to add the missing context

Rand al'Thor

@Bookworm HNQ.

@CowperKettle My first thought was "what do you mean? he doesn't look that much like the pictures of Shakespeare". That's quite the coincidence. He's even from Warwickshire too!

CowperKettle

2:52 PM

Tis not enough that through the skin thou prick
And in a fortnight booster shot apply
For no man well of such a salve can speak
That drives not antibody count up high

Nor can a mask give physic to my grief;
A virus still can aerosolize
This textile hurdle gives but weak relief
When you are forced to over-socialize.

Tsundoku

@CowperKettle I never thought that Shakespeare was at risk.

Rand al'Thor

4:46 PM

@Bookworm HNQ.

Tsundoku

5:56 PM

The question Is Hamlet a misogynist? has been deleted by roomba / Community user. It had a negative score and a close vote.

Bookworm

0

Q: What characteristics make The Faerie Queene an example of Renaissance literature?

Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene was published in the years 1590 (books I–III) and 1596 (books I–VI, i.e. complete). It is primarily an allegorical work, and allegories were not new in the Renaissance: allegories can also be found in classical literature and medieval literature. Wikip...

history-of-literature edmund-spenser the-faerie-queene

Tsundoku

The question How to describe the tone/mood of “The Wanderer”? has also been deleted by roomba. It has one upvote and one downvote, and four close votes.

@Bookworm Since you did doctoral work in English renaissance poetics, I wrote this question specifically for you @verbose !

And now we have seven new tags for @PrinceNorthLæraðr

Prince North Læraðr

6:18 PM

Oui oui

I will get to them

I'm just so salty about losing my streak

bobble

in The Sphinx's Lair, Sep 26 at 22:30, by bobble

Don't salt yourself - it would kill you, as a tree

Prince North Læraðr

Hehe

Bookworm

8:05 PM

0

Q: In chapter I.5 of Finnegans Wake, how are the "paper wounds" ordered?

In chapter I.5 [page 124 line 3], the "Stop. Please stop. Do please stop. O do please stop" motif is associated with four punctuation marks. These paper wounds, four in type, were gradually and correctly understood to mean stop, please stop, do please stop, and O do please stop respectively, Th...

james-joyce finnegans-wake

Fabjaja

10:01 PM

@Randal'Thor Uni reading list came through with a gem from the one and only TH, The Withered Arm. It's a very short but fast-paced one, with wonderfully creepy touches of magical folklore and lots of pastoral Wessex scenes. Thought it might appeal if you haven't come across it already.

verbose

10:47 PM

Look @Randal'Thor! Someone offered to argue before SCOTUS in iambic pentameter!

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