The Reading Room

1:59 AM

Being a Glossary of Terms Useful in Critiquing Science Fiction by David Smith. Lots of terms you won't see in glossaries of literary terms.

Glossary of the Gothic at Marquette University.

4 hours later…

6:13 AM

@Tsundoku I caved in and wore a hat on the last (?) day of Winter Bash. It's quite hard to see on my avatar though :-)

2 hours later…

7:53 AM

I don't think this is really an interpretation question. Maybe terminology - maybe even something like theory since it's asking about some literary movement?

A: Did Benjamin Franklin say "Holland is not a nation but a shop"? Why?

8:26 AM

From The Complete Works of Benjamin Franklin (published 1888), clipped from a letter to Charles Dumas, dated 6 Aug, 1781: Some writer, I forget who, says that Holland is no longer a nation but a great shop and I begin to think it has no other principles or sentiments but those of a shopkeeper Yo...

^ if nobody on History finds the primary (pre-Franklin) source, we could have a new question here about that

Eng Lit Learner

Q: What does "eternal skill" mean?

Reading the story An Egyptian Hornet by A.Blackwood, I am not sure what to make of the following sentence: (for the context, a reverend hopes for a hornet to sting his enemy): “May God forgive me!” ran subconsciously through his mind. And side by side with the repentant prayer ran also a recogni...

2 hours later…

10:10 AM

@Randal'Thor You should be skeptical about Franklin's "someone once said" and similar claims. It's a common rhetorical technique to attribute one's unsavory opinions to unspecified third parties (for example, "the Duke stoops, they say, in wedding her"), or to make one's ideas seem more profound by attributing them to antiquity (for example, Coleridge's "old Schoolman")

1 hour later…

verbose

11:31 AM

Funny, I still have a hat on.

12:12 PM

@Randal'Thor Do you also have a conflicting sense responsibility to ask Tolkien and Rowling questions here rather than only on Sci Fi?

Q: Does the original German version of Fontane's Tay Bridge poem contain the same literary references?

@Randal'Thor You're right. I would remove interpretation. terminology may be appropriate, but I'm not convinced that theory would fit.

Bookworm

12:32 PM

In this English translation of Theodor Fontane's poem "Die Brücke am Tay" (here translated as "The Bridge by the Tay", elsewhere also as "The Tay Bridge"), I noticed a couple of lines which are clearly intended, at least in this English translation, to evoke thoughts of older literature: “When...

poetry translation german-literature theodor-fontane

@b_jonas With questions about sci-fi or fantasy literature, I tend to choose sites depending on the nature of the question. Something requiring deep analysis might be better here, while seeking author interview quotes to confirm something might be better at SFF.

Same thing with questions about sci-fi or fantasy films: occasionally I have a question that's better suited for M&TV than for SFF.

Oh, topic challenges could be another reason to pick sites. I wouldn't have asked any Neverending Story questions on SFF in March 2018, and I probably won't ask any Asimov questions here this month.

@Tsundoku literary-device? theme?

12:50 PM

@Randal'Thor literary-device would work. I'm not sure about "theme" since I haven't read the novel.

@Randal'Thor Hmm. For Tolkien, you can get deep analysis on Sci Fi too, but you have a point.

@Randal'Thor Oh, we have an Asimov topic challenge. I forgot about that. I'll have to look out for Asimov questions that I can answer then.

@b_jonas Depends. This long detailed answer got two delete votes from high-rep users and a heated debate in comments because it contradicted the author's stated intent.

@b_jonas I just set a bounty on an old one which might be answerable by some story-ID guru.

@Bookworm The German band Junge Dichter und Denker adapted Fontane's poem into a kind of R&B version.

@Randal'Thor Ah yes, one of those where the author claims that his book is not a metaphor for whatever real world event, while the readers think otherwise. And we sometimes don't believe the author, especially if they're George Lucas or Rowling. Tolkien is easier to believe. Those debates can become controversial.

1:07 PM

@b_jonas Tolkien is more believable, yes, but even if he didn't intend any real-world metaphor or allegory, the influence might still be there.

@Randal'Thor Yep.

> I know that Adams didn’t intend for the story to have a deeper meaning, but he has biases, and a life background, and like any human this colors his thoughts and ideas. -- @bobble

> I haven't had COVID-19, but the fact that I'm living in a world with it has definitely affected my outlook. -- @verbose

For Asimov, I'll be looking for easy reference questions, not ones with deep analysis, because I'm not too familiar with the historical background and all his other writer and publisher friends and all that.

Easy reference questions like literature.stackexchange.com/a/1167/139

@b_jonas The mis-use of Tolkien's statement "I cordially dislike allegory" is frustrating because Tolkien says right there in the next sentence, "I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author"

@GarethRees And the Rowling quote scifi.stackexchange.com/a/7307/4918 only says "it would have strengthened the present-day Voldemort considerably", and in another quote "there could be no doubt that Riddle really wanted that diary read, wanted the piece of his soul to inhabit or possess somebody else, so that Slytherin's monster would be unleashed again", yet people ignore those vague statements and believe Riddle's lies instead.

1:23 PM

@Randal'Thor Tolkien doesn't say that The Lord of the Rings does not contain metaphors; he says that it is not an allegory, by which he means a systematic scheme of correspondence like the one in Spenser's Faerie Queene (Redcross = holiness, Una = truth, Britomart = chastity etc.) or Orwell's Animal Farm (Snowball = Trotsky, Napoleon = Stalin, etc.)

And they ignore all the difficulty that the Dark Lord had to go through, with Wormtail's help, to get a new body, even discounting that he wanted Harry Potter's blood specifically, and think that the diary Riddle could just skip all that and become a real Dark Lord copy with a body. It makes no sense.

At least with Star Wars episode 8 and 9, people are just misinterpreting the movie rather than ignoring author statements.

We don't have many Asimov questions yet.

So even though the Shire is metaphorically England, there's no scheme where Shire = England, Mordor = Germany, Gondor = Russia, Rohan = America (or whatever). In fact, Gondor is also metaphorically England (in its feudal, Norman, period), and so is Rohan (in its Anglo-Saxon period), and so is Mordor (in its industrialized cities)

2:24 PM

How good is your German? 10 Fragen zu Shakespeare, die ein Abiturient beantworten kann - und du? The actual questions aren't difficult.

2:36 PM

@b_jonas "Poets are humans too, and what they say about their work is often far from being the best word on the subject." C. G. Jung. CC @Randal'Thor @GarethRees

2:49 PM

Apparently, Jung came to that conclusion before Roland Barthes's The Death of the Author.

3 hours later…

5:53 PM

@Tsundoku I don't speak a word of German and never studied it at all, but somehow I managed to get 10/10.

I assume the Anne Hathaway question was about the "second-best bed" thing? That was my biggest leap of guesswork, I think.

6:16 PM

@Randal'Thor admittedly I saw yoru new question scifi.stackexchange.com/q/241456/4918 and didn't immediately realize the connection either, until Clara Diaz Sanchez posted a nice answer.

New Topic Challenge Suggestion

7:03 PM

@Randal'Thor Yes, it was about the "second-best bed". Some of the questions were ridiculously easy for anyone who has a basic knowledge of English literature.

8:00 PM

A: New Literature SE Topic Challenge Suggestions Thread

Katja Kettu Katja Maaria Kettu is a Finnish author, originally from Rovaniemi in Lapland, "one of the most acclaimed authors in Finland today", who's written a number of novels. Her most famous work is Kätilö (The Midwife), which has been translated into several languages, adapted to a film, and ...

Well, you give detailed, documented answer and then you get this kind of comment:

I actually know all this already. I didn't ask for an essay about these concepts. I asked a very specific question which you did not at all answer. This and only this is my question: "[A]re the hypotext and hypertext both forms of intertext, or is only the hypertext a form of intertext?" — mig81 27 mins ago

@Tsundoku Or, for that matter, Matt Thrower, Spagirl, and verbose? Currently they're on 114, 114, 108 answers; if verbose posts 6 more answers they'll all be equal.

@Randal'Thor That could happen indeed.

3 hours later…