2017 WAO Literature Discussion

[Jason Cheng]

Along with the biology (which, aside from writing the replacement/editor's questions and providing feedback, was mostly Jonathan Luck, so credit should go where it's due), I edited/wrote the majority of the American, Euro, and World/Other lit, with assistance on the rest from Will.

I tried to maintain as many of the submissions I received, with (or occasionally without) heavy editing, which led to something of a genre imbalance in some cases that I noticed, which I apologize for.

While Will (correctly) points out that a lot of material in the literature was colored by personal interests, I actually don't think this was any different from editorial influence at any other nationals, and I made a concerted effort to make sure that there was also a decent balance of "standard" questions along with a wide variety of "wacky" approaches to writing literature questions beyond just my own tastes. Put another way, I tried to include a variety of different styles of questions in both content and type of question. I don't really have a codified way to articulate my philosophy regarding "type" of question, but it's something along the lines of deep text one-work core question vs deep surrounding context of one-work core clues (you may recognize the leadin to Madame Bovary if you've read Ferrante's Frantumaglia) vs two-work tossup vs variety of titles by author vs thematic common links vs old-style question on a lesser-known work by a core author and so on and so forth. I don't actually read much into the theory of question writing on this forum besides occasional discussion threads, so I don't know if these are novel ideas (in fact, I'd be surprised if they were), but it's as close to an overarching philosophy as I had with the literature in this tournament, along with my usual attempts to represent a wide variety of how people interact with literature--criticism/genre/historical/context/cultural/mainstream popularity/etc along with simply reading the text.

I'm particularly busy right now, but I'm willing to talk about the questions I wrote in this set forever and I'd love to hear any kind of feedback about the literature in this thread (questions, comments, concerns, etc)! If I get the chance, I may post a list of the questions I'm most curious to see reactions on.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

To clarify a bit - Jason did most of the American and European lit, aside from a few guest appearances by myself editing/writing the non-Brodsky Russian lit and the sanatorium question (which has been made a bit easier). I did most of the world lit, though Jason made significant contributions in areas where he was definitely more qualified to edit.