Talk:Robert Kaske/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 13:36, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

Well I may as well have a go at this one. Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:36, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

Comments

• This is nicely written and very well sourced, so I'll have few comments to make. (Love the story about the 2 profs...)

• Thanks for taking this on! I agree that it's a nice story; I've spent some time figuring out how to track it down, and may email Emerson Brown Jr. (the source for that anecdote) to see if he has any ideas. Given how well sourced Brown's bio of Kaske is, however, I suspect he would have cited the story if he knew where it appeared.

• I'm not convinced that the lengthy lists of minor works are justified here. This is most obviously an issue with the 'School works' which we'd only normally cite if influential later (like Tolkien's early efforts with Elvish languages). However, a biography article is not the place for a comprehensive list of 'Articles', still less of 'Chapters' - most senior academics have written a pile of those, after all; and I'd not think we'd want to include 'Other', aka Memorial Statements, either. Perhaps the best thing here would be to create a Robert Kaske bibliography, leaving just the books and any articles actually cited in the main text?

• There are differences of opinion on this topic, but I tend to think that an article on a subject is improved by having a full list of their publications. Perhaps if Kaske had hundreds of works, or if he had a website with an easily available cv, it would be time to branch out into a separate article, or provide a link to his website. But Kaske has no such easily available list available (his 1986 Festschrift is the best alternate), and as multiple obituaries mention (Groos et al. 1986, p. 7; Sowell 1989, p. 119), his output was both fairly small, and filled with important works. The school publications are the stretch case—though some, like "Sergeant Hinchey's Homecoming", are illuminating—but their obscurity also provides an important reason for them to be listed: may as well save the next interested party the hours it took to cobble them together. --Usernameunique (talk) 08:24, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

• Perhaps the school list is the least defensible. Chiswick Chap (talk) 18:17, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

• I've just read through them all, and if understandably arch, they do shed light on Kaske's college years and beliefs; among other things, it's interesting to read a bunch of anti-war and pro-peace musings from someone who signed up for the ROTC in his first semester of college and then shuttled off to the Pacific to spend World War II with the Army. I've also used a decent number of them as sources. --Usernameunique (talk) 06:14, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

• Well, it's obvious you are prepared to work exceptionally hard to keep them, and there's certainly no problem with those that are used as sources. My view which I record here is that they are "unnecessary detail" (GA criterion 3b), i.e. the article would pass without them, indeed more easily.

• I'm not totally convinced by the primary sourcing in 'Publications', either. Why is it needed? The sentence "Kaske particularly enjoyed solving cruxes, publishing half a dozen articles ..." would be sufficient with the secondary source; indeed, it could look like synthesis or worse to unsympathetic eyes.

• It actually hews very closely to the source, which states that "His favorite stance was that of a solver of cruxes. In articles like "Langland's Walnut-Simile," [cite], "Two Cruxes in Pearl: 596 and 609–10," [cite], "Dante's 'DXV' and 'Veltro,'" [cite], "Ex ci transicionis and Its Passage in Piers Plowman," [cite], "The Reading genyre in The Husband's Message, Line 49," [cite], and "The gifstol Crus in Beowulf," [cite], Kaske focused on an allusion or an image which presented problems of interpretation and suggested a new way of understanding the passage, often by drawing on his vast store of learning in the Christian-Latin tradition." Perhaps it's not needed, but it's interesting to see what works he focused on solving cruxes in.

Yes, that's the 2ndry source, which is certainly needed; I agree the rest is interesting but not necessary.

• Marriages: did his first wife die, or did they divorce?

• Divorced, presumably; according to some searching on ancestry.com she was still alive after Kaske's second marriage, although I couldn't find any divorce papers. Here's how the source describes it: "Although he was married while home on a short leave, the war left him little time for domesticity. It was nearly four years before he could return to civilian life. David, his son from that marriage, now lives near Cincinnati with his wife and two children. ... In 1958, his first marriage over, he married Carol Vonckx of Elgin, Illinois." I've added the following line for clarity: "The marriage suffered with Kaske stationed away from home, however, and was over by 1958."

Sailing quite close to the wind there.

Too close? --Usernameunique (talk) 07:29, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

Not FAC-worthy, for sure; whether it's GAN-seaworthy I'm not sure, but "suffered ... away from home" does beg the question, how'd you know? It seems that all we know at present is "The marriage was over by 1958." Actually it seems unlikely that #1 ended, the paperwork was sorted out, and #2 began the same year: but we don't know that either.

Fair enough. Changed to But "the war left him little time for domesticity", a colleague later wrote, and the marriage was over by 1958. I would guess it was over before 1958 too, but it was definitely over by then. --Usernameunique (talk) 07:54, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

Yes. The niggling thought is that 1945-1958 is 13 long years to elide, i.e. we're a couple of notebooks short of a biography (as we say in Britain). Still, it'll do for now. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:59, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

• " at the time of his death, Kaske also had three grandchildren": no need for anything before "Kaske" here.

• I'm happy either way. The reason for "at the time of his death" is because I've received pushback in other reviews over the fact that one's number of grandchildren can change after death.

Ah yes, posthumous conception, how could I have overlooked it. 😉

• "At Washington ... including ... including ... " - maybe reword.

• Done.

• Maybe "patristic learning" needs some sort of gloss.

• Agreed. Added a link and an explanation: "Around 1960, Kaske joined a panel discussion in which he defended patristic learning—the study of early Christian writers—as a way of interpreting vernacular literature."

• "a kind of native intution" - typo.

• Fixed.

• Wikilink Medieval Academy of America.

• Done.

That's about it from me. Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:59, 24 May 2021 (UTC)