UPDATE - All the Lit We Cannot See (2020)

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ivanilyich
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UPDATE - All the Lit We Cannot See (2020)

Post by ivanilyich »

UPDATE: Have come back to this tournament after being overwhelmed with work stuff and I've decided to rethink it - the contemporary questions & ideas were turning out substantially better than anything else, so I'm going to change the tournament format. All questions will be on literature 1900-present. The set will consist of seven packets of 20 powermarked tossups with this distribution:

5 Prose Fiction
1 'Non-Academic' Prose Fiction (this covers sci-fi, YA, historical fiction, fantasy, any other genres that have historically been excluded from quizbowl literature)
4 Poetry
4 Drama
2 Essays, Articles, Criticism
2 Misc (e.g. tossups on events in the literary world, CLs which cross genres, works which don’t neatly fall into the previous categories, etc)
1 Creative Media (this includes music lyrics, films/TV/video games/other creative media substantially connected to literature, etc)
1 Non-Literary Text (this includes tossups on forms involving written text which are not typically designated as 'literature' - think, for instance, Tweets).

Most content in this tournament will be either well-known / well-studied texts within Anglo-American college curricula which have been so far underrepresented in quizbowl, or important texts which are underrepresented in Anglo-American college curricula. The tournament will have gender parity (there will be as many tossups focused primarily on women as there are tossups focused primarily on men), and it will substantially represent authors of colour and LGBT+ authors.

The academic prose, poetry and drama distros will also be distributed by location: roughly 2.5 Brit / 3 Anglo / 2.5 Euro / 2 World. (Non-Academic Prose will not be location distributed.)

The questions are 8 lines in 11pt Garamond, and the difficulty is currently around Nats level. It's difficult to exactly gauge the tournament difficulty, because there are authors and books in there which have never been tossed up before, but that doesn't mean that people won't have read them - particularly if they're eminent contemporary authors with a presence in popular bookstores. The tossups will not be as dense as Nats tossups, partly because they're shorter, and partly because I'm not incorporating as much literary criticism into tossups as Nats does (with the exception of the dedicated Essays/Criticism tossups).

The Creative Media and Non-Literary Text distributions are there to give a bit of relief from the lack of subject variation, but also to extend and challenge what we consider to be the boundaries of 'literature.'

I'm excited about this, but I'm also relatively new to writing quiz questions on this scale, so if anyone has any advice - or any suggestions for who to contact for possible help with editing - that would be much appreciated.
Last edited by ivanilyich on Wed Feb 26, 2020 7:54 am, edited 3 times in total.
Dani Cugini
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Re: Announcement - All the Lit We Cannot See (Winter 2019)

Post by heterodyne »

I am quite excited for this tournament's existence, and would be happy to either contribute to its completion or play it.
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Re: Announcement - All the Lit We Cannot See (Winter 2019)

Post by A Dim-Witted Saboteur »

This sounds cool. I'm very much looking forward to playing it!
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Re: Announcement - All the Lit We Cannot See (Winter 2019)

Post by Tippy Martinez »

Great to see a tournament with increased contemporary lit content. Highly looking forward to this!
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Re: Announcement - All the Lit We Cannot See (Winter 2019)

Post by Carlos Be »

ivanilyich wrote: Sun May 05, 2019 5:17 am 2.5 Brit / 3 Anglo / 2.5 Euro / 2 World.
what is anglo?
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Re: Announcement - All the Lit We Cannot See (Winter 2019)

Post by Mike Bentley »

What's the thinking behind giving poetry since 1950 the same space as long fiction since 1950? My guess is that there's 100x an audience for long fiction than poetry written in this period.
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Re: Announcement - All the Lit We Cannot See (Winter 2019)

Post by ivanilyich »

justinfrench1728 wrote: Sun May 05, 2019 2:42 pm
ivanilyich wrote: Sun May 05, 2019 5:17 am 2.5 Brit / 3 Anglo / 2.5 Euro / 2 World.
what is anglo?
Literature from Anglophone countries - in practice, this will be mostly American, with some Canadian, Australian, Irish, etc. Anglophone non-Western countries will generally go in World.
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Re: Announcement - All the Lit We Cannot See (Winter 2019)

Post by ivanilyich »

Mike Bentley wrote: Sun May 05, 2019 4:05 pm What's the thinking behind giving poetry since 1950 the same space as long fiction since 1950? My guess is that there's 100x an audience for long fiction than poetry written in this period.
That’s part of the reason for it - I’m focusing on underrepresented content, and contemporary poetry is very underrepresented in quizbowl (Anne Carson has literally started getting dedicated tossups at hard levels only this year, and she’s been a Thing since the early ‘00s at least). I’m essentially intending for the extra contemporary long fiction and the extra contemporary poetry to fill different roles; the extra contemporary fiction rewards a layman’s interest in the modern book scene; the extra contemporary poetry rewards a more academically informed sense of the current literary scene. 1950-present is also a workably long period. But I’m open to adjusting those distros (I’ve not written most of the contemporary poetry tossups yet).
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Re: Announcement - All the Lit We Cannot See (Winter 2019)

Post by Carlos Be »

fwiw i'm excited for a large amount of postmodern/contemporary poetry and I don't think the current quantity would require cuts too much deeper than what one would expect for this sort of tournament
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Re: Announcement - All the Lit We Cannot See (Winter 2019)

Post by Banana Stand »

This seems like a fun tournament! Very interested in either writing or playing.

(Autobiography of Red was tossed up at CO 2016, btw)
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Re: Announcement - All the Lit We Cannot See (Spring 2020)

Post by The Sawing-Off of Manhattan Island »

Is there an update on when this set will be ready? I'd love to play it whenever it happens!
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