Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of fictional literature featuring opera


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   no consensus. -- RoySmith (talk) 00:40, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

List of fictional literature featuring opera

 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

Reasons include: totally unreferenced since January 2011, despite header; unencyclopaedic in nature - no proper explanation of criteria, objectives or purpose; a great number of works/authors do not have WP articles - hence liely to be non-notable; some works (e.g. Tolstoy's 'War and Peace') definitely don't qualify under any criteria; etc. etc. Smerus (talk) 15:02, 21 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep – The list's deficiencies, as Smerus above and User:Voceditenore at Talk:List of fictional literature featuring opera point them out, are a reason to improve the article, not to delete it. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 01:43, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
 * The thing is, VdT's comments are five years old - and nothing has been done. If one were to stick to the rules and tidy up the article, all the entries would be deleted. Is there anyway not something arbitrary about this list? - we might just as well have e.g. 'List of fictional literature featuring forests' or cakes, or.....Would matters not be better served by a category?--Smerus (talk) 09:13, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I see little point in it and would not be unhappy to see it deleted. There are plenty of other areas where improvement is needed rather than spending time and energy on this - and which relate specifically  to opera.......Viva-Verdi (talk) 13:40, 22 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Keep – I'm the one who began the article based on crowdsourced comments. It shouldn't be hard to lay out explanation, criteria & other of Smerus's comments.  -- kosboot (talk) 00:59, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
 * If it's not hard, then do it! You've had six years or so.....--Smerus (talk) 08:03, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
 * The obvious retort to this is, "There is no deadline" (don't spoil it by reading that essay). -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 11:30, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
 * And the not so obvious retort is: "ok, how to start?" The idea I originally had was a list of fiction that contained a mention of opera. All of the items on the list have something to do with opera, some extensively, some superficially.  Since this is factual ("This book mentions the fictional soprano X") what kind of citation is necessary?  Being WP, I'm well aware that we have to arrive at a consensus at what features such a list should include.  So I await to hear from people who are interested in improving it. -- kosboot (talk) 12:15, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, the appropriate citations would be the book(s) concerned and some page references, according to WP:V and WP:CITE - I can't believe you're not aware of this, it's standard stuff. Thus, for Vedontakal Vrop by Malcolm Bradbury: source: 'Bradbury, Malcolm (1983). Rates of Exchange. London: Secker and Warburg. Paperback edition ISBN 9780099340003'. Note: 'Bradbury (1983), pp. 228-239'. And without such citations, there's no bar to deletion of content.....which is the obvious retort to Michael Bednarek. I'm eager to know btw what 'War and Peace' has to do with opera, btw....(edition and page reference please).... --Smerus (talk) 16:21, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
 * So Smerus, can I interpret your remarks as suggesting 4 columns: (1) author, (2) title, (3) bibliographic information (including ISBN), and (4) rationale for inclusion -- yes? -- kosboot (talk) 16:29, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Fine by me!--Smerus (talk) 16:59, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Literature-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 20:49, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 20:49, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

"Tolstoy, Lev [Leo] Nikolayevich
 * comment -- I'm not a great fan of list articles and have no strong feelings about this one, but I can answer the War and Peace question. The appearance of opera in the novel is a deliberate and key element, according to the Grove Dictionary of Opera: http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/O004704?q=tolstoy&search=quick&pos=2&_start=1

(b Yasnaya Polyana, 28 Aug/9 Sept 1828; d Astapovo railway station, 7/20 Nov 1910). Russian writer, distinguished hater of opera. He had some musical education: he could play the piano after a fashion and even composed waltzes. Sensitive not only to the pleasures of music but also to its ‘hypnotic’ influence and hence its power to uplift or corrupt, he maintained that there could be no aesthetic judgment without an ethical component. Good art was art that communicated simple ideas and emotions directly and intelligibly, uniting artist and audience in accord with Christian teachings. For Tolstoy opera, with its mongrel mixture of media, its needless complexity, its irreality and its reliance on flamboyant convention, epitomized the falsity of art at its most debased and stood as metaphor for falsity in social relations. The scene of Natasha Rostova’s moral downfall in his novel Voyna i mir (‘War and Peace’, 1869) is set fittingly against the background of an opera performance, in detailing which Tolstoy employed the (actually extremely artful) device of outwardly naive description – what critics of a later age would call ostraneniye (‘strange-making’) – to unmask and condemn the absurdity of such perverted ‘counterfeit art’.

...

It is grandly ironical to imagine the scoldings that have been administered over the years by directors and conductors immersed in the task of staging one of the operas that have been based on the works of Tolstoy. Pride of place among them, of course, goes to Prokofiev’s magnum opus, War and Peace, in which the irony is compounded by the fact that, while he did not show the imaginary opera Tolstoy described (evidently compounded out of stock elements remembered from Lucia, Robert le diable, Rigoletto, Trovatore and other operas popular in Tolstoy’s – not Natasha’s – time), Prokofiev devoted practically the whole first half of his opera (‘Peace’) to the episode that the night at the opera sets in motion: Natasha’s infatuation and planned elopement with the rake Anatole Kuragin." Apologies for the length, but I couldn't possibly cut the "distinguished hater of opera" bit. Scarabocchio (talk) 21:12, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
 * A thousand thanks :-) --Smerus (talk) 21:43, 23 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Delete. Completely arbitrary list. Per WP:LISTN, lists are also subject to notability guidelines; the topic of the list – "fictional literature featuring opera" – needs to have been discussed by multiple reliable sources, and I can't find any evidence that this is the case. DoctorKubla (talk) 06:28, 24 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Comment I agree with DoctorKubla, that this is a currently a completely arbitrary and unencyclopedic list of unreferenced trivia and a candidate for WP:BLOWITUP. However, it can be potentially fixed, provided that inclusion is strictly limited to instances where the use/mention/discussion of opera, and more importantly the significance of that use in a particular piece of literature has been verified and discussed in a scholarly independent source, as in the Tolstoy case. It is not enough to simply give bibliographic information for the novel, the page number(s) where the mention of opera allegedly occurs, and a "rationale" which consists solely of what the mention is.  The list also needs a well-written and well-referenced introduction to the topic demonstrating the notability of the topic itself. There are plenty scholarly works that discuss the significance of various examples as well as the meta-topic, e.g. Overtones of Opera in American Literature from Whitman to Wharton, Opera and the Novel: The Case of Henry James, Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust, and Opera, the extravagant art plus several more listed at the end of this section at  Talk:List of fictional literature featuring opera. It can be done, but it requires a fair amount of work and commitment from those wishing to keep it. Finally, this topic is unsuitable for a columned list. It needs to be much more discursive if it is to have any value to the reader. At the moment its encyclopedic value is zero. Voceditenore (talk) 22:03, 28 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Delete: This ought to have no value to any member of WP:Opera! Why waste our time when there is so much more worthwhile editing to be done? (How many operas did Donizetti - for example - write?  How many need real work done on them?). There's a lifetime of work facing us here .......!!) Viva-Verdi (talk) 22:44, 28 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I personally agree with you there, Viva-Verdi. I'm certainly not prepared to work on it for the very reasons you give. I'm wondering if the best thing to do would be to userfy it or to "projectify" it until it becomes something more than a raw data dump. Voceditenore (talk) 22:55, 28 April 2014 (UTC)
 * The list's value "to any member of WP:Opera" is not the determining factor! -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 06:16, 29 April 2014 (UTC)
 * No, it's certainly not the determining factor, or a factor at all, for that matter. However, it seems unlikely that anyone will turn this into anything approaching a valid encyclopedia article in the foreseeable future. In the 6+ years since it was created, no one (opera project member or not) has done anything with it apart from adding wikilinks and a couple of books like this. From a practical point of view, it may be better to userfy this rather than leaving it in article space. (I'm kind of sitting on the fence at the moment, simply because the overall topic has potential). Likewise, if the outcome here is to remove it from article space, I think it should be preserved either as a user page or a sub-page at WikiProject Opera rather than deleted outright. Voceditenore (talk) 09:07, 29 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I was thinking of moving it to a sub-page of my userpages. Though it hit me:  perhaps WP:Opera should have such sub-pages for articles "not ready for prime time" until someone has the energy & interest to get them ready. (I'm rather pre-occupied with my own projects at the moment.) -- kosboot (talk) 11:02, 29 April 2014 (UTC)
 * My own view is that moving it to a sub-page at WikiProject Opera (as opposed to a user page) would increase the likelihood of it being eventually improved enough for article space, especially if we list it on the project's talk page in the Article creation and cleanup requests section. I wouldn't mind working on it sporadically in project space over the next year, but I simply do not have the time at the moment to do a blitz in article space that would make it an unambiguous "keep". I've asked an editor with a lot of experience in these types of situations to give a view on this. I'm not going to !vote one way or another for now. Voceditenore (talk) 12:42, 29 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Comment: having followed an interesting link from a user talk page on my watchlist and found myself here, I've fixed up the entry/ies for Dorothy Dunnett's Dolly and the Singing Bird (there were 2, unsurprisingly as the book has been published with 3 titles!) : links to Worldcat records (would have just added linked ISBNs but too early), and a quote from a back cover found on Amazon to show the opera connection (as my own copy isn't to hand just now). Presumably that's the sort of thing needed for them all? Pam  D  16:30, 29 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Delete This is much too broad of a topic for an encyclopedia article to be written about it, which makes it a list for the sake of being a list. An article called Opera in literature that offers a prose analysis of of the subject would be encyclopedic. That article could analyse opera in Tolstoy as well as other notable authors. But even in that article it would be inappropriate to namedrop every piece of literature in Wikipedia that features an opera. That sort of "article writing" isn't appropriate in any article. It's best here to delete as there is little content worth saving, and because the article structure and presentation is fundamentally flawed.  Them From  Space  18:13, 29 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep Of course it would also be good to have an article talking about this deeply, but general information over a broad field is also valuable. A list of the occurrence of notable subjects in notable works is a will established feature of this encyclopedia. Besides serving a navigational function, it's wholly encyclopedic information. Lists like this lead to unexpected serendipitous discoveries, one of the traditional virtues of any encyclopedia: I would think that someone who came an item where they didn't see the connection would be glad of the opportunity to investigate, not seek to delete the article.   I can think of no actual basis for deletion except that one does not think the occurrences of the major plot and setting elements in literature worth knowing about. Every item here can be references, but there should be sufficient information already in the relevant WP articles, or their coverage of the fictions is greatly defective (quite possible, since some here so much deprecate the inclusion of plot and setting information in articles.
 * I think even unimproved this an an obvious keep, because it is one of the principles of WP that we do not delete articles because they should be even better. (As a way of going forward, the most critically needed step is to indicate what opera is referred to in the work in question; the more difficult next steps are to write articles about the authors which are currently unrepresented in the encyclopedia  and  to write articles  about each of the various operas referred to in the works when there are specific operas.   This should keep the   people most interested going for years, but that's the intrinsic nature of WP, and the way it is intended that articles here should be written: by successive improvements. Some people here do write complicated articles by themselves in one go at it, but most of the encyclopedia is written far otherwise.
 * The most general principal involved is that those who see articles that they think should be mush more extensive to do the work to improve them, not  to delete the existing information There's about 95% of the encyclopedia for which I could very fair say: this really isn't good enough, we might do better to start over entirely. But we only do that when there is something not just incomplete, but so fundamentally wrong as to be unfixable,as for advertising and copyvio.  If not obvious, I am a great fan of lists, which is offers just the sort of rudimentary but very broad knowledge I often like--but if my mental inclination were the opposite, and I couldn't tolerate anything being mentioned which is not discussed fully, I would not interfere with what other people found useful and informative.  For 2 examples, I am totally uninterested in articles or parts of articles giving notable people from X,  even for browsing, because it's too random, but I leave those be, or even improve them from time to time.  I find it a great sin against literacy to present anything in a table that could be presented in paragraphs, but if an article is structured as a table, I leave it  also.  DGG ( talk ) 01:23, 30 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Keep Just needs ref improve for which there is no time limit. The question for AfD is if the topic is notable, and I believe it is. We already have articles on individual fictional operas, so a list of fictional operas is in the same category of notability. -- Green  C  04:25, 30 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Actually, Green Cardamom, this list isn't about fictional operas. It's a list of fiction works which feature the subject of opera (usually real ones) in the plot, e.g. a murder mystery that takes place in an opera house, a character who is an opera singer, or a major episode in which a character attends/reacts to an opera. Voceditenore (talk) 05:53, 30 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the correction. You'd think lists about real things would be even more notable than articles about fictional ones. -- Green  C  15:42, 30 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Keep DGG's arguments have convinced me :) Voceditenore (talk) 05:53, 30 April 2014 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.