The Reading Room

Bookworm

3:43 AM

0

Q: Is there a version of Snow White where her name is a longer description?

Is there a version of Snow White where her name is a longer description? TVTropes says: Snow White. Her real name is "Lips Red as Blood, Hair Black as Ebony, Skin White as Snow" based on the wish her mother made. Everyone just calls her Snow White because it's easier. This is even carried over t...

folk-tales

bobble

3:58 AM

@Randal'Thor I know :) Was looking for something I might be able to solve in a few hours with the benefit of a librarian and my vast university collection

Rand al'Thor

6:40 AM

@bobble Looking through my unanswered questions (of which there's >100), some seem like they might be easily answerable by some lengthy searching and reading. Surely there's academic papers about Cain and Beowulf, or Shakespeare and his actors, for instance.

The B(a/o)rsetshire question also feels like there should be a definitive answer lurking somewhere if only it can be found.

Also, I think I missed the news that you're in university now? So congrats! :-)

Gareth Rees

11:02 AM

@bobble Yes, congratulations and good luck with your studies!

As for questions that could be answered in a few hours with a library, I'm not sure. Digital archives are so convenient (being searchable) that the only need to visit a library is when you want to read a particular work and it is not available online. I have access to a university library just fifteen minutes cycle away and I hardly ever go!

For this answer I wanted to read Janet Porta's 1988 Ph.D. thesis, "The function of biblical allusion in Jude the Obscure", but who knows if it would even have been relevant.

CowperKettle

Gareth Rees

For this answer I wanted to read Manfred Gorlach's The Textual Tradition of the South English Legendary (1974). In fact, I bought a copy from the University of Leeds! But it is the work of more than an hour or two to understand and summarize it.

For this answer I would have liked to find a digitized manuscript sermon with a biblical epigraph from before 1400. This is kind of a specialized query — not many libraries have medieval manuscript collections.

Tsundoku

11:55 AM

@Bookworm Will the Hot Network Question (HNQ) melt Snow White?

@Bookworm I have not close-voted the question about Rumi's "The new rule" because it is probably an interpretation question. Interpretation questions are on topic on this site.

b_jonas

12:34 PM

@GarethRees OSzK and Akadémiai Kvt both have mediaeval manuscripts, but they also have special rules on who can access them and how and I'm not familiar with those rules because I never need books that old. I assume you searched for scanned versions on the internet first.

But yes, before 1400 does make that very rare.

Tsundoku

What are some good interpretation questions that we can point new question askers to when they ask, "What does this poem mean?"

Gareth Rees

12:53 PM

@b_jonas Manuscripts degrade with handling so it's better to work with digitized copies if at all possible, or to pay for a digitization specialist to scan the manuscript and add it to one of the many online archives

Tsundoku

The following look like good examples to me: Emily Jane Pfeiffer’s “To the Blind Architect of the City of Life”, Marianne Moore’s ‘Four Quartz Crystal Clocks’, Ko Un's "Around Unmun Temple at Ch'Eongdo" and Louise Glück's "Vespers".

Gareth Rees

In the Glück question, the whole poem has been quoted despite being in copyright, no maybe it's not the best example to show new users. In the Moore question, I was careful to quote one one stanza out of seven, which I think is justifiable as fair use

I think the most successful interpretation question was John Betjeman’s "Suicide on Junction Road Station after Abstention from Evening Communion in North London", which attracted three detailed answers

Tsundoku

Yes, that also looks like a good example. (For the purpose of my question, it is not vital whether the question has answers or not.)

bobble

2:04 PM

@GarethRees my problem is I have no idea how to search :)

Rand al'Thor

2:20 PM

I've edited the Glück question to remove the full text of the poem, while clarifying that the link is to a page where it's reproduced in full with permission.

@Tsundoku I think it would be better to showcase answered interpretation questions, to convince people not only that such questions are OK for this site, but also that they can be reasonably answered within the scope of Stack Exchange. (A reasonable argument against them might be that they're so open-ended that an answer would be book-length and too long for SE.)

Gareth Rees

@bobble There's a useful post on meta with links to resources in the answer. But of course there is a lot to learn about each kind of resource and what it is good for, and this takes practice

Tsundoku

2:37 PM

@Randal'Thor OK.

Gareth Rees

@bobble Here's an example of using various search tools to write this answer to find scholarly ideas about the meaning of the name "Jude" in Hardy's Jude the Obscure.

I guessed that this might be something that literary scholars have published papers on. So I started at scholar.google.com and put in the query "the name jude" "jude the obscure" (the former because it seems a likely phrase to appear in the publications I am looking for, and the latter to avoid false positives).

On the second page of results, I found a citation to Jeffrey Berman's book Norman N. Holland: The Dean of American Psychoanalytic Literary Critics where the snippet for page 14 includes the fragment, "Holland analyzes in depth the characters’ names (including the name Jude)" which sounded like the kind of work I was looking for.

So I went to the book in Google Books and tried to see if I could get it to show me enough context from page 14 to identify the reference from Holland. Eventually I searched within the book for "Jude" and the results suggested that the paper was likely to be called "Jude the Obscure: Hardy's Symbolic Indictment of Christianity".

So, I went back to Google Scholar and put in the title, and that gave a link to the paper on JSTOR where luckily it was open-access.

This is a kind of quick go-around to find a work on a topic — in the case of the Jude answer, it was plenty, but in a longer answer I might have continued by reading the paper and needing to follow references or idea to other books or papers. In this answer about handwriting in Beowulf, you can see that basically all I did was follow up chains of reference

Gareth Rees

3:04 PM

It is often worth being persistent with chains of reference. Until you reach primary sources, you can never be quite sure that you're not being misled by secondary and tertiary interpreters. In this answer about Joyce's opinion of Hamlet there was an untrustworthy middleman, and in this answer about the mythical "Aullay" there were some surprises along the reference chain.

bobble

@Randal'Thor yup! I think I announced in a few other chatrooms, must've missed this one. studies going along swimmingly, though I don't have any classes which require extensive English essays... yet.

I've also recently passed the $500 mark for self-made income \o/ tutoring on the side

Rand al'Thor

A question about comparing adaptations of Borges's "The South" and an ID question about a fantasy novel were deleted by the Community bot in 2019. What do people think about undeleting these questions?

@bobble Nice!

What subject are you studying? (If you don't mind the question.)

By the way, libraries aside, even being on a university IP can be really useful in researching stuff. There's loads of journals and papers which are freely accessible only from academic IPs or for people willing to pay.

bobble

Bioinformatics :)

Currently I have ochem, math, lab, and Japanese classes

Rand al'Thor

Nice. That's a pretty interdisciplinary subject, from what I know: drawing on both biology and computer science, and maybe maths and data science too?

bobble

3:21 PM

Yup! I have to take quite a few bio and CS classes.

Going into the future, I may try to take a data-science-in-biology focused master's, but that is a few years away.

Rand al'Thor

Are your Japanese classes just about the language, or do you get to study some japanese-literature as well?

bobble

Just language, because that's the GE req. Though we are supposed to learn culture at some point.

Rand al'Thor

We've got lots of unanswered questions in that tag, hint hint ;-)

bobble

I actually collected information about all the main characters for answering this question, pinged the OP about whether they would like it to update their answer, and then forgot about it...

Though the ping was in chat. I may try a comment now.

this one is a candidate for looking up in the school library. I know we have a decent selection of foreign literature.

@bobble I seem to have lost my notes on this... :(

Tsundoku

@Randal'Thor Both seem valid questions to me.

Studying culture is indispensable when learning languages connected to cultures that are very different from our own.

bobble

3:40 PM

Not when their idea of studying a language is parroting the exact conversations/sentences that they drill into us.

Recently at least they taught enough grammar/sentence structures that we can plug-and-chug ideas out, but not anything interesting. And it's frustrating since I already know more but am not allowed to use it.

Tsundoku

That's fine if you don't need your knowledge of the language outside the classroom but not when you start talking to native speakers.

bobble

The textbook has cultural notes, but they always make me feel icky because of how sweeping they are. "The Japanese do X", for example, as if they're all some monolith. I also much prefer "Japanese people" to "The Japanese", for reasons I can't fully articulate.

My university library system does indeed have both the Japanese original and English translation of Beauty and Sadness.

I've put in a request for the Japanese one and should be able to figure out this question - online translation tools + knowledge that it's at the start of Chapter 7 + my rudimentary understanding of punctuation etc.

Tsundoku

4:02 PM

I suppose "Japanese people" does not necessarily mean "all Japanese people".

Rand al'Thor

Since Peter Shor has put a bounty on it, I decided to promote the Gluck question on Twitter:

in Twitter Control Room, 30 secs ago, by Rand al'Thor

Requesting an analysis of the poem "Vespers" from #TheWildIris by #LouiseGlück https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/15927/17?stw=2 | #Poetry #LiteraryAnalysis @LouiseGluck

Should I add a disclaimer "Not a homework question, just for interest" to this Tweetable message?

At first glance it might look like someone trying to get ideas for an assignment, to people unfamiliar with our site's interpretation tag.

Tsundoku

4:37 PM

@Randal'Thor I wouldn't. Twitter users who are unfamiliar with SE will likely not understand how homework is relevant to that question.

The Tintin et les Picaros tweet has not attracted any answerers, apparently.

@bobble @GarethRees On Language Learning SE, we have a meta post for Resources for Researching Language Learning Questions. Something similar for Lit SE may also be useful. But we may add some guidance on how to get started, rather than just listing and describing resources.

Rand al'Thor

5:25 PM

@Tsundoku OK then, I've gone ahead and pinned it for the feed to pick up.

@Tsundoku I've undeleted and upvoted both questions.

Alex

6:29 PM

@GarethRees This inspired me to post an answer there.

Gareth Rees

6:56 PM

@Alex Good answer!

Alex

@GarethRees Thanks.

Rand al'Thor

7:14 PM

@Alex And with that you've made it to the front page of users by rep.

Alex

@Randal'Thor Nice. I can retire now.

Tsundoku

@Randal'Thor "deadlineless" bounties. As we get closer to Halloween, those will become undeadlined.

Rand al'Thor

@Alex Not while there are still harry-potter questions waiting for outside-the-box answers.

Alex

@Randal'Thor Good point.

Tsundoku

@bobble If you have access to good resources on Japanese literature, you might consider looking into Are there different formats of haikus?

Alex

7:24 PM

not enough of them being asked, though.

Rand al'Thor

@Alex Though apparently you have competition as the resident discoverer of apparent discrepancies in the-count-of-monte-cristo.

Alex

I noticed that. I guess I have to review it.

Rand al'Thor

@Tsundoku Asking 'bout haikus / In a post formed of haikus? / That's worthy of praise.

Bookworm

0

Q: 'Nature Nodding' - author and date?

Haldane MacFall's novel The Wooings of Jezebel Pettyfer (1898) has a lead-in quotation that puzzles me. No author is indicated; the quotation is ascribed to a work, 'Nature Nods', but no amount of searching on Google or ABE has brought 'Nature Nods' or its author to light. The quotation reads in ...

quote-source haldane-macfall the-wooings-of-jezebel-pettyfer

Rand al'Thor

7:57 PM

A two-year-old review on One Minute Reviews is still pinned on the StackLiterature Twitter page, although there've been seven reviews since then. @Mithical can we unpin or switch the pin? (pinging you since I think you know how to handle Twitter stuff)

Quarterly best-of posts for the second and third quarters of 2021 are still unpopulated. Anyone feel like nominating some favourites?

Ongoing topic challenges: Belarusian literature (one week remaining!) and Jorge Amado.

Tsundoku

"Haldane set his first novel The Wooings of Jezebel Pettyfer in Jamaica and, unusually for the time, it had a West Indian hero." the-wooings-of-jezebel-pettyfer Source: Wikipedia

Mithical

8:21 PM

@Randal'Thor unpinned

b_jonas

10:07 PM

@GarethRees Yes, that's why they have all those rules. They're not easily replacable modern printed books.

@bobble And what are you tutoring in? Is it all mathematics to first and second-year college students?

bobble

@b_jonas it varies, based on who contacts me through my online profile. Recently I've done high school Physics, biology, and AP Calc

I do independent contract work through an online platform. Give up 25% of the money in exchange for a steady trickle of students

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