Talk:Helen Gardner (critic)

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: withdrawn by nominator, closed by Narutolovehinata5 (talk) 01:00, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

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• ... that English literary critic Helen Gardner had a character in the play Wit based on her?

• Reviewed: Kartik Naach
• Comment: DYKcheck states that the article hasn't been 5x expanded, but that is not true.

5x expanded by SL93 (talk). Self-nominated at 03:32, 29 June 2020 (UTC).

• SL93, this needs some copy edits ("weild", and look at the first sentence of the second paragraph of the "Methodology" section). Moreover, it needs a bit of critical sophistication. I don't have access to An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers, which is where that material about her methodology comes from, but that material is a bit problematic. Like, that "the logical meaning" and all that, it's wordy and it's really a kind of a cliche--that's what every critic of that era would have claimed. I've read some of her work, I have one of her books on the shelf, but what we need to know here is what school she thought she belonged to, what critics said about that, etc. Her interest in "author's intent" suggests that her methodology was formed before the New Criticism, and her sneers at structuralism etc. mark her as conservative (just like the New Critics, ironically), but this needs clearing up, and not just in cliches. Moreover, Eliot was foundational for New Criticism, and that fits perfectly also with the time in which she was educated. So, was she a New Critic who also believed in intentionality? And that commentary on "over-interpretation" and "technical jargon", the (erroneous) idea that contemporary critics just attack, that should not be said in Wikipedia's voice--it's her opinion. And with "over-interpretation", is she pointing at New Critics, or all the schools afterward? That matters greatly. Finally, I don't think Wit is all that well-known, and I think you could consider writing a hook that indicates her enormous achievement of making it as a woman (without a PhD!) in a man's world. Drmies (talk) 16:07, 30 June 2020 (UTC)

• @Drmies: I honestly cannot do all of that with the sources that I have available and I also don't have access to jstor. If I'm expected to subscribe to different sources for the main page and to go above and beyond the DYK requirements just for one fact on the main page, I'm out. SL93 (talk) 18:18, 30 June 2020 (UTC)
• I'm not trying to be rude, but I can't do much more with the sources that I have. SL93 (talk) 19:17, 30 June 2020 (UTC)

• I understand, and we're not talking GA level edits here, but the article needs a bit of help. I see that William Avery has already made some necessary copy edits, but more need to be done--that's the very least. Drmies (talk) 20:36, 30 June 2020 (UTC)

I cannot guess what "Gardner was exist the literary belief..." might mean. One could not really direct users to an article in this state. The new material in the Methodology section is very thin. It's possible the available sources won't support 5x expansion. William Avery (talk) 21:24, 30 June 2020 (UTC)

William Avery, I don't know what to do with that either. I pulled a few things from JSTOR. The problem with the sources is that the biggest one is inaccessible to me. What should happen here is that SL93, or you or me, pull a bunch of reviews from her dozen books and beef up the article that way (and place notes in the bibliography). There's that set of lectures, was it Religion and Literature? which is well written up, and there was some material on lectures she gave at Harvard, I believe. Thanks, Drmies (talk) 22:12, 30 June 2020 (UTC)

@Drmies: The word that I meant to use was "against". I fixed it. SL93 (talk) 03:51, 1 July 2020 (UTC)

@Drmies: I did some copy-editing, added her religion, that she has no school of criticism, that she was against New Criticism, that her Oxford Book was also published in braille, and that she was in International Who's Who in Poetry 2004. I also added information about her 1971 book Religion and Literature and the review from jstor because I found out that users can read 100 free articles without an institution. I don't know how to properly cite jstor though. The article currently has 7,182 characters. SL93 (talk) 07:23, 1 July 2020 (UTC)

Don't worry about length. Drmies (talk) 15:57, 1 July 2020 (UTC)

It would probably be better for me to withdraw this. SL93 (talk) 03:34, 2 July 2020 (UTC)

Withdrawn. SL93 (talk) 00:56, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

More

SL93, thanks for expanding this; she certainly deserves this. I'm going through JSTOR, and a few minutes there provide at least two reviews for her Religion and Literature ([www.jstor.org/stable/3726216], [www.jstor.org/stable/514275]), a set of lectures that warrants a bit more than that sneer from the NYT (that citation needs completion). Those lectures, as well as her other work, is noted as having been influenced by her lifelong, stern Anglicanism, and I don't see that in the article yet either. Anyway, it seems as if her main problem with New Criticism as well as with structuralism was that both tend to do away with the author, and she was strangely fascinated by the concept and the person of the author. See this, for instance, and maybe this (better yet, this chapter), and this. Thanks, Drmies (talk) 16:28, 30 June 2020 (UTC)