We invite papers that are concerned with annotations to specific literary texts written in English and address their functions. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. This gave us an opportunity to think about our experience in writing notes; what follows are a few notes about what was said, followed by a summary of a recent article and information about a conference on this very subject. It has been suggested that notes could be tested on a group of readers of the type we are aiming at, but this seems difficult since the characteristics of the group will be just as inconsistent as those of the individual. The authors propose not to attempt guidance by an imagined readership but to provide annotations that are of use to a variety of readers and do not think that interpretation should be discarded from annotations altogether. His notions of trade are noble and generous, and (as every rich man has usually some sly way of jesting, which would make no great figure were he not a rich man) he calls the sea the British Common. For 90 minutes, two cantankerous and incoherent old men ignored the rules, shouted over each other and ruined the event. Yet there’s something else at stake this time too. ‘This perspicuous presentation presentation makes possible that understanding which consists just in the fact that we “see the connections” ‘. He is studying the passions themselves, when he should be inquiring into the debates among men which arise from them. This week in 1989, the Chinese authorities massacred protestors in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. in what is considered relevant and in compositional style). 4. This isn’t a podcast per se — you go to the article and click on a surreptitious audio link at the top to hear the man himself read it. Beinecke Collection (McKay), vol 3: Letters by RLS, Stevenson's Essays: Yahoo discussion group, A catalogue of the books and manuscripts of Robert Louis Stevenson in the library of Harry Elkins Widener (1913), The Stevenson library of Henry A. Colgate (1928), The (illustrated) Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, Stevenson MSS, Harry Ramsden Collection, Univ. From this point of view, I admire the self-restraint exemplified in Mehew’s notes. Their aim has long been to get as many right-leaning justices on the bench as possible so as to eventually overturn Roe. The Supreme Court fight could have a profound impact on the elections, and not just insofar as they’re about to turn up the political temperature even further. 1. The only hope would be some kind of grand compromise between the two parties, and given our fraught partisan climate, that would be no guarantee. Rules are intended to be followed always and will be corrected by the copy-editor. They then analyze a series of actual annotations by asking two questions: (A) What knowledge does the annotation presuppose? Presupposing (expert) knowledge: the assumption of knowledge that is never made explicit, as for example in a quotation from the same author that supplies a wider context (an enriching rather than explanatory annotation), when this is not clearly related to the text being annotated (just introduced by something like ‘Compare’). My face is likewise very well known at the Grecian, the Cocoa-Tree, and in the theatres both of Drury Lane and the haymarket. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Republicans, meanwhile, watch riots tearing through city streets, statues and monuments being defaced, cancel culture menacing those who dissent, and accuse Democrats of complicity. Take any class of undergraduates and you’ll find that a certain percentage of them studied Latin at school, another set learned a lot from a television series about Roman Britain, others were brought up in Scotland, some hated Geography classes and can barely name a capital city … you get the idea. In the mean time, when I consider how much I have seen, read, and heard, I begin to blame my own taciturnity; and since I have neither time nor inclination to communicate the fullness of my heart in speech, I am resolved to do it in writing, and to print myself out, if possible, before I die. Look elsewhere for help in defining a word or phrase. A fortnight ago, I mentioned the fellow-travelling influence of Joseph Needham, Cambridge’s indisputably scholarly historian of Chinese science. ‘Of course, it’s not your fault. Some are so erratic and random as to be of no use whatsoever. He told me Mrs Thatcher disliked Deng when she met him, saying: ‘He’s very cruel.’ Sir Percy had replied: ‘He wouldn’t be where he was if he wasn’t.’. Some problems found while annotating the essays. I spent a lot of my childhood guessing what galoshes and gymkhanas were, but it didn’t spoil my enjoyment of boarding school literature, in fact it probably heightened the impression of an encounter with the exotic. As few of his thoughts are drawn from business, they are most of them fit for conversation. W. F. Prideaux, A bibliography of the works of Robert Lewis Stevenson (archive.org), Beinecke Collection (McKay), vol 1: Printed Books, Beinecke Collection (McKay), vol 5: Manuscripts by RLS, Robert Louis Stevenson, Hitherto unpublished prose writings, ed. 3. […] See also Writing Explanatory Notes. Don’t copy-and-paste the OED definition. An important aspect of its success was its notion that urbanity and taste were values that transcended political differences. We agree that guidelines cover most of the activity of writing notes. 4. Sending the reader on the wrong track: for example, using a general definition from the OED that omits important contextual meaning in the text being annotated or meanings supplied by the author’s personal use elsewhere. I have found it useful to look at the notes for the few essays in my volume that have been annotated in the past, realising that their extent and content is defined not by the intended audience but the editor’s agenda. Examples are ‘start the note with a lower-case letter if you could insert an ellipted “is” or “means” after the lemma’. F interpretative (synthesis of A–E) Lightness (RD). 'The Spectator', volume 1 of 3 (plus translations and index), comprising previously unpublished eighteenth-century essays, poetry, letters and opinions, originally edited by Addison and Steele, now available in html form, as a free download from Project Gutenberg Maybe the current disasters will start running together, with murder-hornet hurricanes attacking the East Coast and coronavirus-infected wildfires torching mail-in ballots out west. So I agree with Lesley: ‘The real process is […] much more intuitive than following a list.’ travellers, and headers, and rubble, and polished ashlar: should we define terms that Stevenson did not expect his readers to know? He and I went to see the great man, who said: ‘I think the [demonstrating] students were extremely foolish… Only 600 died, you know.’ Eventually, after I had threatened resignation, my column on Hong Kong was reinstated, but published opposite an article by Lord Stevens himself, under the joint strap of something like ‘Two views on Hong Kong’. 5. three months she dreamt that she was brought to bed of a judge whether this might proceed from a law-suit which was then depending in the family, or my father's being a justice of the peace, I cannot determine; for I am not so vain as to think it presaged any dignity that I should arrive at in my future life, though that was the interpretation which the neighbourhood put upon it. The second part of the article describes a model of layered annotations for digital editions, but the following notes are only on the first part, which examines seven ways that existing annotations do not take into account readerly needs. C intratextual (motifs, recurring structures etc.) If you think that’s hyperbole, just listen to what our would-be leadership has been saying. So we turned the leading article into a two-page affair (a thing unheard-of) and devoted the whole cover to a drawing by Nick Garland of Britannia and the British lion, both kowtowing. […]. The papers were ostensibly written by Mr. Spectator, an “observer” of the London scene. For this reason, therefore, I shall publish a sheet-full of thoughts every morning, for the benefit of my contemporaries; and if I can any way contribute to the diversion or improvement of the country in which I live, I shall leave it, when I am summoned out of it, with the secret satisfaction of thinking that I have not lived in vain. As the chief trouble of compiling, digesting, and correcting will fall to my share, I must do myself the justice to open the work with my own history. For both sides, much is at stake. He is one of those that deserve very well, but are very awkward at putting their talents within the observation of such as should take notice of them. With this candor does the gentleman speak of himself and others. [1]. This turn makes him at once both disinterested and agreeable. 2. Avoid self-indulgent additional information, e.g. I find the technique set out in the article referenced at the end of the blog post, with its layered system of annotation, rather alarming. I never espoused any part with violence, and am resolved to observe an exact neutrality between the Whigs and Tories, unless I shall be forced to declare myself by the hostilities of either side. 2. The GOP has thousands of volunteer attorneys, and the chief counsel at the Republican National Committee has pledged to ‘spend whatever it takes to make sure the election is conducted orderly and that we push back on the Democrats’ litigation’. of Texas at Austin, Fill His Head First with a Thousand Questions, Writing Brtain: Wastelands to Wonderlands, "Acts may be forgiven; not even God can forgive the hanger-back. Some are inaccurate. It struck me that the people of Hong Kong would suffer huge collateral damage. Dunfermline, in whose royal towers the king may be still observed (in the ballad) drinking the blood-red wine: in supplying the allusion to the ballad should we add historical information about royal connections of the town (we thought not). Beinecke Collection (McKay), vol 2: Printed Books, Pamphlets, Broadsides etc. He discusses on the podcast how November’s election could send America into disarray. G textual (variants relevant to the understanding of the text) Meteor storms? Look in related entries in the OED, e.g. In addition to Addison and Steele themselves, contributors included Alexander Pope, Thomas Tickell, and Ambrose Philips. You obviously got a China “expert” to write it.’ ‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘I consulted China experts, but I wrote every word myself.’ He was sweetly embarrassed. Sometimes I smoke a pipe at Child's, and whilst I seem attentive to nothing but the Postman [a newspaper], overhear the conversation of every table in the room. And a lord he was (reading a Greek New Testament on the beach of Fair Isle): do we need to identify him? The probity of his mind, and the integrity of his life, create him followers, as being eloquent or loud advances others. Because of its fictional framework, The Spectator is sometimes said to have heralded the rise of the English novel in the 18th century. I had not been long at the university, before I distinguished myself by a most profound silence; for during the space of eight years, excepting in the public exercises of the college, I scarce uttered the quantity of an hundred words; and indeed do not remember that I ever spoke three sentences together in my whole life. He will, however, in his way of talk excuse generals for not disposing according to mens dessert, or inquiring into it; for, says he, that great man who has a mind to help me has as many to break through to come to me as I have to come at him: therefore he will conclude that the man who would make a figure, especially in a military way, must get over all false modesty, and assist his patron against the importunity of other pretenders, by a proper assurance in his own vindication. H questions (items that require annotation; comments on research already done relating to an item). 6. Dark and lurid, they posit cabals of paedophiles, networks of Russian infiltrators — the sorts of dark forces which would have no problem skewing a few ballots. On the subject of the irrelevance of the author’s biography, I would just say that if our aim is to provide today’s reader with the knowledge that the late 19C reader had at his/her disposal, we have to recognise that Stevenson’s life story was well-known to most readers and that we may have to explain some of the biographical allusions to give our readers that same advantage. Guidelines for a single editor will be an internalized feeling of what is right; editors working on a coordinated project will be guided in the same way, but some written guide is also necessary. He rebukes a lecturer in Chinese, Michael Loewe, who had criticised the regime: ‘On the question of the number of executions which took place during the Revolution and since then, I much regret that Dr Loewe… is evidently unaware that the expression translated by “liquidation” carries the meaning of solving a problem, and by no means necessarily implies the disappearance of the offender.’ And perhaps ‘final solution’ in German meant completing the crossword. He knows the argument of each of the orations of Demosthenes and Tully, but not one case in the reports of our own courts. The lawsuits flew, and the issue made its way to — natch — the Supreme Court. The following were some thoughts stimulated by the same email exchange mentioned by Lesley, with some reference to Lesley’s notes too: 1. He says it is a civil cowardice to be backward in asserting what you ought to expect, as it is a military fear to be slow in attacking when it is your duty. Almost immediately it was hugely admired; Mr. Spectator had, observed the poet and dramatist John Gay, “come on like a Torrent and swept all before him.”. The conversations that The Spectator reported were often imagined to take place in coffeehouses, which was also where many copies of the publication were distributed and read. Shell House: should we supply more information about this place? Full disclosure: I came up with the list in the blog post a posteriori, having already done the first draft of annotations for a good number of essays. What we annotate. ( Log Out / If in doubt, lean towards under-annotating rather than over-annotating lexical items. They worry their very heritage is under threat: hence why Trump made a point this summer of speaking at Mount Rushmore and recently created a ‘1776 Commission’ to promote patriotic curricula in education. A medlar the fewer on the three-legged medlar-tree! I have given the reader just so much of my history and character, as to let him see I am not altogether unqualified for the business I have undertaken. Already more than 300 lawsuits have been filed, most of them related to pandemic voting rules and mail-in ballots. Get kids back-to-school ready with Expedition: Learn! The most politically controversial bit of our argument was that Britain should now ‘give right of abode to all United Kingdom passport holders in Hong Kong (about 3.25 million people)’. This is at once frustrating (I would love to tell you about how I believe ‘An Education of an Engineer’ is really about the difficulty of communication and the risk of miscommunication, but also humbling and affords freedom for follow up studies and analyses.). 6. 2. Supreme Court nominations were once placid affairs (Ginsburg was confirmed by a Senate vote of 96-3); today gifting nuclear weapons to Isis is generally more peaceable. My business lay in the two Anstruthers: do we provide date and Stevenson’s reason for being there? Thus I live in the world rather as a Spectator of mankind than as one of the species; by which means I have made myself a speculative statesman, soldier, merchant, and artisan, without ever meddling with any practical part in life. 1. any analysis of the structure of the essay, of its internal logic. Unlike salted peanuts, however, they are all different: more like a series of entries in that fascinating publication Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. While working on an article on Habermas and Dewey in the early 1990s, I asked Habermas if Dewey had influenced him and he responded that Dewey's strong notion of liberal democracy, of politics and the public, and of the active connection between theory and practice made a strong impression on him; see Antonio and Kellner 1992 for details. Restraint. This can be partly solved by repeated drafts and readings by yourself and others. The New Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Robert Louis Stevenson. After studying the whole context very carefully it seems clear that Stevenson is using ‘a generic’ to mean ‘a case apart, i.e. This article was most recently revised and updated by, The Spectator - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up). Kant’s Deductions of Freedom and Morality,” in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason: A Critical Guide, A. Reath & J. Timmermann (eds. But here are the eight categories of annotation content which could well be of interest: A linguistic (lexicon, syntax etc.) Bernie Sanders, speaking at the Democratic National Convention, pronounced the 2020 election to be ‘the most important in the modern history of this country’. We are all in agreement that the latter endeavour is an illusionary goal. Place the gloss or definition first. The platform is open to all for a modest fee. "I BELIEVE I have never had so many readers," says Mr. Dickens in the preface to Bleak House, "as in this book." Biden has said that his campaign has ‘put together 600 lawyers’ and a team of volunteers, who will go ‘into every single state to try to figure out whether chicanery is likely to take place’. The results there were disquieting: weeks passed without winners being declared, and thousands of votes were believed to have been wrongly discarded. The United States has descended into madness before, only to bounce back, and there’s no reason to think we won’t do so again. The last time a presidential election turned seriously litigious was in 2000. Without warning, the one I wrote about Tiananmen Square was pulled. Into these troubled waters has now crashed another cultural cannonball: a Supreme Court nomination by Donald Trump and the Senate confirmation battle that will follow. When he has talked to this purpose, I never heard him make a sour expression, but frankly confess that he left the world because he was not fit for it. ( Log Out / ‘We’ve got to have a massive legal operation,’ she said, ‘I know the Biden campaign is working on that.’, For his part, Donald Trump is also gearing up for this fight — and might sue his way back to the White House. These are my ordinary companions. In short I have acted in all the parts of my life as a looker-on, which is the character I intend to preserve in this paper. of the imaginary writer of the new paper, the successor to Isaac Bickorstaff of the Tatler—we have a humorous portrait of Addison. But that our society may not appear a set of humorists. The production values are non-existent, which is fine by me. Let’s just make it out of this wretched year first. The politics of this was to exploit the difference between the prime minister, who I knew had always been uneasy about the 1984 Agreement, and her foreign secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, who loved it and always spoke of Hong Kong as a ‘Ming vase’ which neither Britain nor China should drop. Whilst I was in this learned body, I applied myself with so much diligence to my studies, that there are very few celebrated books, either in the learned or modern tongues, which I am not acquainted with. I was born to a small hereditary estate, which, according to the tradition of the village where it lies, was bounded by the same hedges and ditches in William the Conqueror's time that it is at present, and has been delivered down from father to son whole and entire, without the loss or acquisition of a single field or meadow, during the space of six hundred years. ‘We have to be very careful with the ballots,’ he said. one rotten fruit the fewer on the gallows tree; medlar: etc. A strict honesty and an even regular behavior are in themselves obstacles to him that must press through crowds, who endeavor at the same end with himself, the favor of a commander. 1. put first the most important and the relevant things; 2. put things in chronological (and other ‘natural’) order; 3. don’t use complicated series of subordinate clauses etc. There is no place of general resort, wherein I do not often make my appearance; sometimes I am seen thrusting my head into a round of politicians at Will's, and listening with great attention to the narratives that are made in those little circular audiences. It is for the good of the audience when he is at the play, for the actors have an ambition to please him. 3. He must know this is misleading. 7. His taste for books is a little too just for the age he lives in; he has read all, but approves of very few. This invention, however, has limits, i.e. D intertextual (relations to other texts) Our politics is unsettled, but not as much as, say, during the 1910s. Addison’s reputation as an essayist has surpassed that of Steele, but their individual contributions to the success of The Spectator are less to the point than their collaborative efforts: Steele’s friendly tone was a perfect balance and support for the more dispassionate style of Addison. 7. Wittgenstein thought that the information in Frazer’s Golden Bough could be better presented without a theoretical gloss ‘by arranging the factual material so that we can easily pass from one part to another and have a clear view of it’. For example blowing in the key cannot mean ‘thrusting in the key’ as there are no examples of ‘to blow’ as a verb derived from (the etymologically unrelated) noun ‘a blow’ (it means ‘blowing to remove any dust from the key before inserting it’). Again, the rules of the contest will not be accepted, each side will accuse the other of cheating and the whole occasion will turn into a disastrous farce. The Spectator's Notes; ... which suspends critical judgment in the face of brute power, thus making that power even more brutish. What happens if the election results are contested? So I agree with Lesley: ‘our un-ideal reader is a tolerant type who will skip over the notes that are superfluous for him/her without feeling that their intelligence has been insulted’: i.e. I cannot tell whether I am to account him, whom I am next to speak of, as one of our company; for he visits us but seldom, but when he does, it adds to every man else a new enjoyment of himself. Please send an abstract (300 words max.) The imagined reader has to be borne in mind but only as a general guide. 1. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. 3. It’s useful to distinguish between rules and guidelines. It would seem that we are hard wired as a species to like random information—which might explain, to a puzzled observer like myself, the addictive nature of mobile phones. Some publications, like Decanter and Wine Spectator, publish profiles, regional overviews and lifestyle articles as well. Following no rule or guidelines, the notes will be too varied in form and will leave the reader nonplussed. The opposite of tact and restraint is self-indulgence, as Lesley points out: desire to make the reader admire what you’ve found or reluctance not to include what took you time to acquire. to the editors of Connotations by October 15, 2018 at symposium2019@connotations.de, Posted in Essays, Lesley Graham, Linguistic aspects, News, Robert Louis Stevenson, Scholarly editing. E contextual (biography, history, philosophy, theology, etc.) I have been often told by my friends, that it is pity so many useful discoveries which I have made should be in the possession of a silent man. He’s pointed as evidence to New York’s primary elections on 23 June, which featured an unusually high number of postmarked ballots due to … Although what she did fell far short of the full rights we called for, Mrs Thatcher did extend right of abode to about 200,000 ‘key personnel’. The situation is perhaps similar with children’s literature: the best writers repeatedly say that while they bear in mind their audience, they otherwise write what they themselves find interesting or want to write. There are so many fascinating facts to be found and that may seem highly relevant but when you step back and look at the whole thing again, you realize you have to cull the extraneous material if you want to preserve the joy of discovering the essay for the reader. As Hemingway said, ‘You know you’re getting near the end when you’re throwing away good stuff’. The following may be of relevance to the writing of explanatory notes. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. You may also be able to make the formulation less wordy than in the OED: e.g. Look elsewhere in Stevenson’s works, e.g. I think it’s clear that the reader of an annotated edition will want to have these allusions explained.] That would kick the decision back down to the lower courts, but multiple lawsuits could result in multiple rulings, a muddle that might create enough confusion for both candidates to claim victory. At the time, I was writing a column for the Daily Express. ( Log Out / I must confess, I would gratify my reader in anything that is reasonable; but as for these three particulars, though I am sensible they might tend very much to the embellishment of my paper, I cannot yet come to a resolution of communicating them to the public. Inconsistent assumptions and unclear functions: where the explanation assumes lack of knowledge in an area but uses unexplained terms from the same area; or provides information which does not have a clear function in understanding the text. I understand that the two cases are very different (and I have probably not fully understoof Wittgenstein’s ideas) but the idea of perspicuous presentation and seeing connections appealed to be as a possible guide in a simple presentation of information in an explanatory note. [more information] [LG It may be useful to compare the OED definition with other dictionary definitions]. For Epstein, having a pet British royal on the scene gave a veneer of decorum to his lifestyle — and even perhaps his unhealthy interest in young girls. After having been thus particular upon myself, I shall in to-morrow's paper give an account of those gentlemen who are concerned with me in this work; for, as I have before intimated, a plan of it is laid and concerted (as all other natters of importance are) in a club. He was placed there to study the laws of the land, and is the most learned of any of the house in those of the stage. The rather shame-faced editor admitted that the spiking had been at the order of the chairman, Lord Stevens. I am very well versed in the theory of a husband or a father, and can discern the errors in the economy, business, and diversion of others, better than those who are engaged in them; as standers-by discover plots, which are apt to escape those who are in the game.
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