Literature top article

[Russell Potter]

Hi fellow Literature editors/authors -- I'm back, at least for now, under a realname login rather than Profrap -- and I am working on a completely new top level entry for Literature.  I've had some great help from John Kenney, but would very much like to see all of us who are Literature editors or authors work on this main entry, and get it up to the same high standards that the Biology workgroup accomplished with theirs -- I think an approved toplevel article should be our very top priority.  Let's use this forum, and/or the article's Talk page, to get started.

Just one thing: please do *not* port or paste material in from WP -- I think this toplevel article needs to be a completely new go at it!

cheers to all,

Russell Potter

[Russell Potter]

Hello?  Hello?  It's been a month, and this page has been viewed a number of times, but no reply, and the only (slight) activity on the article has been from people outside this workgroup.  If you have an interest, and this entry pops up, give a thought to making some contribution, even if it's just a read-through and some suggestions on the Talk page of "Literature"!

[Robert Rubin]

Hi Russell, and fellow Citizens. I'm a newbie to the wiki. I'm a writer and editor by trade, have selected and edited a couple of commercial poetry anthologies, and worked for many years as a literary editor. Now I'm freelancing and working half-time as an adjunct professor at George Washington U's writing department. I'd love to help with the top-level article.

I've got to get through a round of grading papers this week, but when I'm finished, I'd like to propose a revised outline for the Literature article. What would be the best way of doing that?

In general, here's my thought: The top-level article should be more an essay about the idea of Literature, rather than a concise outline of literary history. That, it seems to me, is a whole other topic. The Lit article should link to more specific articles, but its goal should be to introduce the question of what literature is, and how that has been defined over the years. For instance, the section on national literatures, rather than discussing various national literatures, should link to stubs or articles on each one, and introduce the links with a more philosophical introduction to the idea, where it came from, etc. Similarly, I think we'd be doing a disservice to our readers if we didn't spend time on some of the attempts of the past few decades to call the whole canon of literature into question. Personally, I'm an old-fashioned sort, who likes his literature literary, but I don't think we can assume that.

I'll rough out an outline of what I'm talking about shortly. Is this the place to present it, or should I do so on the Talk page?

Robert

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Robert_Rubin

[Russell Potter]

Robert, delighted to see that the constabulary has finally let you through the queue!

About your thoughts -- first off, I should like to note that the entry for Literature, in its current form, is entirely original to Citizendium.  I wrote nearly all of it, though certainly with the earnest hope that it would quickly be corrected, expanded, polished, re-arranged, and re-polished over and over again.

But I must disagree with you about the "idea of of literature" being somehow separable from its history.  If indeed the ancient Greeks, Saxons, Chinese, Finns, and Egyptians all had the same notion thousands of years ago as do we today of what the "idea of literature" was, then this might make sense, but clearly the idea of literature has shifted, in many and complex ways, since these ancient times.  So the top-level entry must necessarily give some survey of this process of change.  More detailed accounts of literary history could, I agree, better be located on the national literature or genre literature pages, e.g. "History of English Literature," or "History of the Epic."

As to national literatures -- such national literatures as are mentioned are mentioned only by way of example, in order to illustrate exactly what you suggest -- a philosophical and historical account of the ways in which nations and literatures evolved and came to be conjoined.  The ones that are mentioned should be linked, yes, but the list wouldn't be comprehensive; perhaps we'll want a page along the lines of "National Literatures of the World," where we could list all these, and to which the toplevel article could be linked.

As to questioning the canon, yes -- but I think this can best be done by demonstrating a) of how very recent a vintage *is* the notion of a literary canon; b) how that canon has changed over time; and c) a summary of some current debates.

I should say in the interests of full disclosure that I am a very theoretically-minded literary scholar, though one with a strong commitment to primary-source research and careful historiography (as opposed to some of the more slash-and-burn literary theorists out there); I did my graduate work with Robert Scholes at Brown University, and looked at Chaucer's role in the evolving English literary canon.

But by all means, let's continue this on the Talk page of the entry!!

Cheers,