The Reading Room

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bobble

00:06

@GarethRees that's a relief.

It's really nice to have this place to pose literature questions to. In previous lit classes I would have queries about the text but felt awkward asking the teacher, and anyhow they weren't always available. Here I can ask on my own time and people answer on their own time.

9 hours later…

AncientSwordRage

08:58

@bobble it's definitely an interesting question well posed

3 hours later…

AncientSwordRage

11:47

would a chat feed for english.stackexchange.com/tags/literature/info be something people want?

3 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

14:18

Nice answer from new user gilles (presumably no relation to the high-rep Gilles).

Bookworm

14:55

Q: What's happening at the end of "Pigeons" by Isaac Bashevis Singer?

The final paragraph of Isaac Bashevis Singer's short story "Pigeons" goes like this: The following morning broke autumn-like and drab. The skies hung low and rusty. The smoke of the chimneys dropped back, gathering on the tile roofs. A thin rain fell, prickly as needles. During the night someone...

Mithical

@Bookworm And that's the last of my prepared questions. Gotta try to come up with new ones now...

3 hours later…

Gareth Rees

18:06

@Bookworm This is not an easy question to answer! Here's my internal dialogue:

The answer is "translator's whim"—Why do you think that?—Because lines 134–200 were probably sung by the whole chorus originally—How do you know that?—Lines 134–171 are in anapaests and 172–200 are in dactylo-epitrites!—Dactlyo-what now? How does that help?—Anapaests were suitable for a marching song as the chorus enter and dactylo-epitrites for dancing the parodos—How come it took so long to get the chorus on stage?—The orchestra was just that big!—What's the orchestra?

And so here I am researching the evidential basis for reconstructions of the fifth-century Theatre of Dionysus in Athens

Napoleon Wilson

18:41

@AncientSwordRage Sure this doesn't already exist?

AncientSwordRage

@NapoleonWilson you tell me

Gareth Rees

@AncientSwordRage Feeds for this room are listed here — we have a feed for the "literature" tag at ell.se, but not for the corresponding tag at english.se.

bobble

19:34

@GarethRees at least I wasn't missing something obvious! Should I apologize for taking so much of your time? :)

Prince North Læraðr

Doot doot

I am back! (Maybe)

@bobble Have you been diligently editing the tags?

bobble

That I have. Also made the excerpts for the new tags created in the course of the single-bobble topic challenge

Prince North Læraðr

Haha

Gareth Rees

19:56

@bobble I wouldn't do it if I didn't find it interesting! The evidence base for the performance of classical tragedy is sufficiently thin that everything depends on everything else, so picking anything and asking "how do we know this?" pulls in the whole thing

bobble

oof, I was hoping that narrowing the scope would help with that a bit

AncientSwordRage

20:13

@GarethRees thanks for the link, that's really helpful

3 hours later…

Bookworm

23:11

Q: Why doe the chorus pray to Rhea in "Philoktetes"?

This is from James Scully's translation of Philoktetes (also known as Philoctetes), in The Complete Plays of Sophocles, translated by Robert Bagg & James Scully. After Neoptolemos tells Philoktetes how Odysseus took Achilles' armor and explains this is why he (Neoptolemos) is going home, the chor...