Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/A Tale of a Tub

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[edit] A Tale of a Tub

Yes, I know I have one nomination here already, but this is not a self-nom, all I did was to add a picture. A very complete article about a very important book. Filiocht 07:26, Oct 19, 2004 (UTC)

• Support Mpolo 08:41, Oct 19, 2004 (UTC)
• Object. This article needs copyediting, references, and de-POVing. Some samples: "For us, religious tolerance seems automatically virtuous", "It is too much to hope to provide much historical background", " Although many critics have followed Ehrenpreis in arguing that there is no single, consistent narrator in the work, this position is difficult to maintain.". Such sentences can be found throughout the article, from the lead section to even the discussion of the references. In particular, the "authorship question" section is biased. Instead of trying to convince the reader, it should present the facts, and mention what the generally accepted opinion is. In addition to this, there are some problems with the tense of sentences (facts from the past are represented as in the present). Jeronimo 11:22, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)
  • I'm afraid we seem to be reading this article through radically different eyes. Filiocht 14:04, Oct 19, 2004 (UTC)
  • Umm, Jeronimo, I don't what I can say except that there are references, and what you think of as POV is really a report on multiple criticis, i.e. a summary of critical opinion. There aren't very many critical works in English written between 1780 and 1985 on the Tale that I haven't read. As for the references section, there is one. When it says "some have followed Ehrenpreis," you can find Irvin down there at the bottom of the page. I had even toyed with making it an annotated bibliography, where each work was not merely listed, but actually discussed in terms of its point of view. Won't say I'm an expert on much, but Tale of a Tub I am. Geogre 14:28, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Also, when I had references with an explanation of what parts of the works (these are all book-length studies) contributed to the article, Jeronimo considered that POV and bad language? Huh? As for the Authorship Debate, these are the facts. The style is in keeping with Swift's other works. Thomas Swift has left only a few sermons and one satire. That's persuasion? That's a report. Finally, the "mix of tense" is literary present. It's necessary in writing about literature to say, "Ahab pursues the whale" rather than "And then the guy chased the whale." When one is discussing the book as an artifact, one uses the past tense ("It was published in 1704"), but when one discusses the action within the fiction, one uses the present ("The putative author misunderstands metaphors, seeing them as literal truths"), unless there is a previous contrastive fictional action ("Although the author admits to being insane, he earlier stated that he was a retired member of Parliament"). More images have been added to the article now -- one woodcut from the original, a title page of the first and fifth editions. Geogre 21:23, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Well there are strong statements, that if not cited, are POV. For ex. "Stylistically and in sentiment, the Tale is undeniably Jonathan's". There is no possibility someone else wrote it? Does not a single researcher still believe it is possible someone else wrote it? If so, that needs to be stated and cited. The claims in the entire 'Authorship debate' section need inline citations. For example (Ehrenpreis, pp 221-223). That type of citation will solve the POV issue. - Taxman 18:17, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)

Seriously? No, no one currently believes that anyone but J. Swift wrote it. The debate died out in the 19th c., and, as I indicated, the argument is now viewed by scholars as a political one. As I said in the article, we tend now to see people who wanted Thomas Swift to have written it as Whig enemies of J. Swift's Tory views. It was still a politically active text as late as the turn of the 20th c., so people who had a particular point of view wanted to cut it or include it in J. Swift's works. That I even included the authorship debate is just a sign of inclusiveness, because it's a long dead debate; I was trying to be historically accurate by saying that there was one. As for inline references, it would be virtually impossible. How can I say this carefully? Um, the work just is like Swift's other works and not like Thomas Swift's works. Ehrenpreis is too late to even consider the debate. The last person I know of to even bother with it was Sutherland in 1910. The information on the debate cames from Arthur Cash (not cited because he's a lunatic and not someone I'd recommend to a general reader wishing greater information on the Tale in general) and from the Guthkelch and Smith apparatus, which is cited. I had originally even indicated that the Guthkelch and Smith is useful primarily as the authoritative text, but then people thought that was POV, too. I don't know what, besides my Ph.D. with a concentration on Augustan satire and my Master's thesis being on the Tale of a Tub, can possibly convince you guys that my opinion on this matter is not a POV one but, rather, an accurate representation of scholarly consensus. Let me put it this way: I urge objectors to find a single dissenting opinion on anything but the persona point of view taken in the article. Geogre 18:27, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

That's not the point. Wikipedia is not original research. Just because you know a lot about it, doesn't mean you can make claims that are not cited to someone else. Wikipedia is a secondary source. Indicating one source as the primary reference is POV, but citing a statement to a particular work is not. Just because people pointed out you cited sources inccorrectly before does not mean the article should not be properly cited. If no one seriously considers it a valid debate, simply state that and cite it. But "the Tale is undeniably Jonathan's" is very simply a POV without citation. By the way, my example citation above was simply that, an example to show how to cite a claim to help avoid POV. - Taxman 18:40, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)

What on earth has Wikipedia is not original research got to do with this article? Filiocht 08:48, Oct 21, 2004 (UTC)

Read the above and below comments and that link. He is making very strong statements and his justification for them is that he knows the subject very well and that the follow up statements prove the point. The link specifically was for the point "Specific factual content is not the question. Wikipedia is a secondary source (one that analyzes, assimilates, evaluates, interprets, and/or synthesizes primary sources)". But Geogre feels that he does not need to cite sources to specific facts because they are correct. They may be, but that is not the point. The article makes way too many claims without citation to specific sources. - Taxman 16:47, Oct 21, 2004 (UTC)

Taxman, I can't see any way that there is original research here. The "Authorship Debate" had a citation before I just changed it. It said, "Anyone seeking more information should look at the Guthkelch and Smith," meaning that there is a lot of nauseating detail there (exactly who thought TS wrote it, which pre-1920 scholars argued this way and that). So it wasn't original research even then. Now, there's no way it is. Secondly, the other "strong statements" had references, too. They didn't have page numbers for their references, because, at this point, it's been too many years for me to go get a note on exactly where. However, the critical trends were fairly represented and evenly portrayed. Since there is a bibliography, and since there are inline references to the sources, whether you think the statements are strong or not, they are referenced. That's why, in exasperation, I asked for any evidence of anyone out there who disagrees with the portrait I gave of the reaction to the work. If anyone reading this is on a university campus, please ask any professor of 18th c. literature to look at the article. There is only one thing in the whole of the long article that is cutting edge research, and that's the material derived from Elias. Only people who specifically study this particular work will have encountered that. I avoided genre arguments, any presentation of what the text argues for or against (except what everyone agrees upon), and only presented one view else that might require up to date reading, and that is McKeon's view that Swift represents a radical skeptical reaction to naive empiricism (it's part of his dialectic of literary history in the 18th c., which is a Marxist view; the deconstructionists and such don't dirty their hands with history), and that's cited both inline and in the bibliography. Geogre 00:23, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Look, it's not original research. It's scholarship. There is a big difference. By the way, if you read the Authorship Debate section again, you'll see that "The work is undeniably Jonathan's" is followed by proof of that. Why is it undeniably his? Well, first because it matches his prose style. Second, because Thomas Swift, the other supposed author, was not a writer (left only a few sermons and one short satire). Third, because the narrative pose is in keeping with all later works by Jonathan. That sentence is a thesis that is then proven by citation to 1. Swift's works, 2. Thomas Swift's works, 3. Swift's style. That's citation! Now, I'd far rather have an annotated bibliography, because scholarship on the Tale is really gnarled. It's a work that people say widely divergent things about. A recent survey of professors of 18th c. literature revealed that a minority teach the work now because "it's too difficult." I.e. it's a very complex work, so critics say the darnedest things about it. Note that I avoided very studiously getting into the contents or what the book "means." I avoided that because saying anything there would have been original research. My views are not minority. There is only one view I hold that is out of fashion (or was, when I was training...don't know how things have gone since), and I very clearly indicated sources there. Geogre 22:26, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I see now that not all of my examples are equally good, and my problem with the tenses must have come from somewhere else; I can't recall seeing that in this article. However, I still stand by my opinion. As an example, the sentence "this position is difficult to maintain" (slightly refactored since my original objection) is not NPOV. If all other critics, or even the majority of critics find this difficult to maintain, write that. It is an opinion, so it should be presented as such. I fully agree with TAxman on the authorship section: if it is the belief of all contemporary historians that Swift wrote it himself, just write that (and adding in a specific reference shouldn't be easy either).

Two notes: 1) I can agree that writing totally NPOV about a work of literature is close to impossible, since everybody has a different opinion about it. Still, I think this article could get close to being NPOV with just a little work. 2) Apart from the NPOV/references, this is good article, and I would support it but for those two issues. Jeronimo 19:29, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Ok, it's hard to cite, beyond the citation I already did, that no one says that T.S. wrote it because that's establishing a negative. What I did was establish when people did think he wrote it. I can go into more detail there, but it's just not an opinion anyone has anymore. The "position being difficult to maintain" was the same as above: proof offered after the statement. It's difficult to maintain because the author makes statements about himself that reflect a unified personality. Also, the other side of that issue, that each digression is an entirely different narrator, was offered up fairly and fully, with an indication of who said it. The reason why this position is now out of date (it came about in the early 1960's, so a generation of professors was trained with it) was also given, in that A. C. Elias proved pretty well in the 1980's that Ehrenpreis's chummy view of Swift at Moor Park was wrong (and Elias is cited). The persona theory began to weaken in the 1980's independently of Elias, with scholars saying, "I don't know how it can't be a bunch of impersonations that are all alike" (what I say), which is a shade away from what (rejected) scholars used to say, which is "the character of the Hack author." Ehrenpreis requires the Tale to have been written as an oral performance in the Temple household. The biography Ehrenpreis wrote is great, wonderful, and monumental, but on this the information he used was awful. Ehrenpreis's portrait of Swift's public life is still solid, but his picture of Moore Park was dreadful, and Elias has been chipping away since. Swift at Moor Park showed that Swift was not friends with Temple, was treated like a servant, and felt like a servant. (Is it really necessary to go through all of this here to show you the material I was eliding for the article? Would it have been better in a long article to have expanded? Presenting the persona theory as truth is POV. Presenting the Hack as truth is POV. I present both. That's NPOV. I say that the persona theory is difficult to maintain because it has been difficult to maintain: it's losing ground every day because it was based on a biography that used bad sources for the early years, and the text was always at variance with it.) Geogre 22:26, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

New material added to address objection in the "Authorship Debate" section. I have referred to Guthkelch and Smith's dismissal of the authorship debate and tried to explain how it arose in the first place. It is a conclusion to say that it contined through Scott and Thackery to say that it reflected their critical preference, but it isn't a definitive statement about their motives. The matter of the persona theory (each parody being a separate impersonation) has not been substantially altered because I stand by my position that I was reporting the evolution of critical responses and views of the work rather than injecting a POV about what is the truth of the text. Geogre 03:56, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I appreciate the amount of attention given to my objection, but apparently I stand alone in my opinion, and it seems like I will be unable to convince anyone else. Seeing that the article already has sufficient support to get featured even with my objection, I suggest to end this debate. Jeronimo 14:53, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

• Support; a really comprehensive explanation of an historic and important literary work. Giano 11:39, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)
• Support. I do not understand Jeronimo's objection. Anárion 14:31, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)
• Support. Interesting read. Zerbey 14:58, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)
• Neutral. Could be a little clearer, needs link to Gutenberg text. Dunc|☺ 15:05, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)
  • I have added a link to PG. Filiocht 15:09, Oct 19, 2004 (UTC)
• Support. Neat! jengod 21:02, Oct 19, 2004 (UTC)
• Support, an article to make Wikipedians proud of their project. Jeronimo's problem with the perfectly standard use of tenses must throw a dubious light on his/her other objections.--Bishonen 21:59, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)
• Wait. I didn't nominate it. I did write the article. Does this mean I can vote? Support: I think it's the best article I've written on Wikipedia. In fact, it's the factual content of the lectures I used to give on the work. Geogre 01:26, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)
• Support! This is outstanding material, outstanding treatment, the Wikipedia of the future... until we start breaking it into short articles, separating out each subsection, like a fool unravelling a sweater... Wetman 12:54, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)
• Support: definitely informative and well written. -- [[User:Bobdoe|BobDoe]] 23:34, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)
• Support - not objections, but can the text be copied to wikisource from Gutenburg? And why are there both Category: 18th century and Category: 1700s? -- ALoan (Talk) 15:58, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)
  • The latter was pure ignorance in using categories on my part. I'll fix it straight off. Don't know about putting it on Wikisource, as I've never done much with Wikisource. It's a pretty substantial, novel-length, work, but it would be great if we did have it about. Anything that gets it more readers is cool by me. Geogre 16:38, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)
• Support. — David Remahl 21:45, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)
• Support. If only more literature articles were this good. Gdr 21:54, 2004 Oct 21 (UTC)
• Didn't I already vote for this? Support. func(talk) 21:22, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)