The Quizbowl Resource Center

This thread is the place to discuss the literature in the tournament. I edited American and British literature and Rob edited European, World, and Ancient literature.

I'm pretty firmly in agreement with your position in the difficulty thread, and I thought that this tournament did a very good job of emphasizing deep knowledge of important works over cursory knowledge of lesser works. There were a couple of answer choices I thought were strange (Call of Cthulhu, the Fountainhead), but on the other hand, we got to hear lots of well-written tossups on works that didn't start out with the same old clues from Masterplots. I was a fan.


P.S. Your tally in the other thread counted tossups on poems under "works," correct?

Cernel Joson wrote:There were a couple of answer choices I thought were strange (Call of Cthulhu, the Fountainhead)

Any reason you thought these were strange? (I edited the first, Ted edited the second)

As for my part of the literature editing, I mostly tried to stick with, and normalize the difficulty of, what was submitted. I think the biggest conscious style choice I made was to avoid one of my biggest pet peeves: hard-part-first bonuses with unnecessarily hard hard parts, especially of the form work/author/easy part.

Do let me know what you thought about my stuff.

Ukonvasara wrote:

Cernel Joson wrote:There were a couple of answer choices I thought were strange (Call of Cthulhu, the Fountainhead)

Any reason you thought these were strange? (I edited the first, Ted edited the second)

As for my part of the literature editing, I mostly tried to stick with, and normalize the difficulty of, what was submitted. I think the biggest conscious style choice I made was to avoid one of my biggest pet peeves: hard-part-first bonuses with unnecessarily hard hard parts, especially of the form work/author/easy part.

Do let me know what you thought about my stuff.

It seems like they're pretty iffy as literature: I got the Call of Cthulhu tossup because I used to read TVTropes.org a whole lot, and I'd expect more people to know about it through an interest in sci-fi than anything else. I'm not saying it was a travesty or anything, especially since I've seen it sold under Penguin Classics, but it seemed to be pushing it; it would have been better as a higher-class part of the trash distro.

I counted tossups on poems as works. I think The Fountainhead and Ayn Rand novels definitely are classified as literature even if its ideological literature. I've seen serious classes where they are assigned alongside Orwell and Huxley. At first, I was taken aback when I saw "Call of the Cthulhu" appearing in the answer spreadsheet because it's definitely genre literature. But, I don't have a problem with a few questions on topics from genre literature such as Philip K. Dick or Sherlock Holmes stories, which are the absolute best of genre literature and actually are incredibly influential to other writers. Don't get me wrong, I hate NAQT's overabundant inclusion of trash literature and would of cut the Lovecraft tossup myself if I were editing it, but I don't have a problem with one or two questions a tournament on a very narrow set of topics from genre literature that have proven to have some literary significance.

I'm somewhat biased as an erstwhile Lovecraft fan, but I think "Call of Cthulhu" is at least a sufficiently significant piece of genre literature that it can be an answer in such a tournament. By the same token, as much as I loathe Rand and her books, they do get consideration as literature as well, so I don't think either of those is particularly out of place.

Yeah, I tend to be pretty sympathetic to the occasional genre lit thing popping up in the literature distribution.

The lit was very well done. There seemed to be a couple of hard tossups, like The Romance of the Rose, but I'm more than willing to accept that that's incredibly important, and more importantly, was the only lit question that Bellarmine didn't lock us out of in our games against them.