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Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/All the Light We Cannot See/archive1

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was archived by Buidhe via FACBot (talk) 19 July 2023 [1].

All the Light We Cannot See

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Nominator(s): Lazman321 (talk) 05:20, 3 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

All the Light We Cannot See is a 2014 novel written by Anthony Doerr. It follows two European characters and their experiences during World War II: Marie-Laure, a blind French girl with a passion for marine biology who escapes to Saint-Malo after Germany invades France, and Werner, a bright German boy with a passion for science who is forced to enlist in a military school to avoid dying in the mines. Written as a celebration of the little miracles in life, All the Light We Cannot See was released to glowing praise; it was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. A Netflix adaptation is going to be released on November 2, 2023.

This is my first nomination for a novel article for WP:FA; the two previous FAs were both for video games, so this may be a new experience fore me. I have been working on this article off and on since March 2022, leading to a successful WP:GA nomination on January 2023 and a peer review that ended on June 2023. I plan on having a successful candidacy for this article before nominating as WP:TFA for either the release of the adaptation (November 2, 2023) or the novel's tenth anniversary (May 6, 2024). Lazman321 (talk) 05:20, 3 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

First-time nomination

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Image review—pass (t · c) buidhe 05:26, 3 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from UndercoverClassicist

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Most of my observations from the recent peer review stand, though I can see that some have been acted on. The main concerns I have at the moment are:

  • NPOV: The article veers towards being advertising or promotional: it narrates Doerr's story of his ideas and motivations in great detail and largely reproduces his own account from interviews and press releases. I would also say that there is WP:UNDUEWEIGHT given to positive characterisations of the book: while it is undoubtedly popular and much loved, critical reception of its literary qualities has been far more mixed than this article would suggest.
  • There remain quite a few places where the prose needs to be clarified or polished. I've pointed out a few of these on the peer review, and I'm happy to pick out further examples as this process progresses.
  • Sourcing: the article seems to be entirely based on peri-publication reviews and other news stories; I would like to see some more academic treatments to push up the HQ part of WP:HQRS, if those exist. From the bibliography it looks as though nobody's written anything about this novel (as distinct from the forthcoming film) in almost ten years.
  • The thematic discussion in the Analysis section seems to have identified topics based on the writer's own ideas, rather than following any secondary source's idea of what the main themes of the novel might be. Particularly in this section, there are a lot of heavily value-laden sentences expressed as fact: the article needs to walk a more careful line between reporting what has been said about the work and asserting what is factually true about it. The article on Casino Royale does this quite well, leading its Themes section with what particular critics have identified as the novel's main themes.
  • In the Background section, it would be good to contextualise the work in relation to Doerr's earlier writing: the Goh article mentioned below by Buidhe sees some important threads from his short stories continued in All the Light.

UndercoverClassicist (talk) 15:56, 3 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Many thanks for the review. I'm attempting to address your points, but there I some I disagree with or would like clarification. Respective to each point:
  • Perhaps there are specific sentences that seem promotional that you could highlight. The example you give for the article being promotional confuses me. Of course it reproduces Doerr's account of writing the novel, that's what the section is about. What would be the alternative? As for the reception section, I did address the concern somewhat by adding a few reviews that felt the novel was overwritten, but I don't think the article misrepresents the prevailing critical consensus. A vast majority of reviews are positive if not laudatory and some articles written about the novel do directly say that it received "critical acclaim", and aside from the overwritten example, there aren't really any criticisms that multiple critics share and thus be worth putting in.
  • The alternative to (simply, exclusively, only) presenting Doerr's account is to provide a broader context. The section isn't "everything about Doerr's narrative of how the book came to be": there's a lot more than that to a book's background, and giving so much detail to what is essentially an advertising story (that is, a story Doerr tells when promoting the book) rubs up against WP:DUEWEIGHT and WP:NPOV. As I mentioned above, I think it would be useful to compare the way that section is written here with the corresponding area of other literary FAs (I mentioned Casino Royale further up: the Development section there might be a start). UndercoverClassicist (talk) 11:15, 11 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Go ahead and point out further examples; I'd be happy to improve the article's prose.
  • If you don't mind, I'd like to hold off on doing a very detailed review until there are a few more reviews: it's quite a big job for both of us, and it would be better done when there's a clearer sense of the direction of travel here. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 11:15, 11 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • I have added a few more scholarly articles, but I will say there isn't a lot of scholarly discussion about the novel, and some of the scholarly articles I have found are utterly useless (if you can see what parts of the Goh and Damian articles I can discuss, I'd be happy to add them.) That being said, the Mengqi, despite a few translation issues about certain names, is really useful and I will probably add more information from the article as the candidacy progresses, so thanks Buidhe.
  • I don't want to turn the analysis section into a quote farm and I feel like much of the unattributed text is objective, at least as objective as literary analysis can be. However, I have tried to address this as best I can by
  • One way around this is to be clear on what's been said: "The descriptions of points of interest, such as battlefields and beaches, are detailed" is a debatable (and inherently unverifiable: who decides what counts as "detailed"?) statement, but "several critics highlighted the detailed descriptions of points of interest..." solves that problem. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 11:15, 11 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Though I did add year disambiguators in response, this one is the one I feel like addressing the least. If by contextualization you mean putting down at the beginning of the background section, "Before publishing All the Light..., Doerr published a novel, two short story collections, and a memoir.", I have to ask why? This article is about All the Light We Cannot See, meaning that Doerr's earlier works should only really be mentioned if they are relevant, which the article already does. (e.g. "During a trip to France in 2005, Doerr visited Saint-Malo to promote his debut novel After Grace."; provides motivation of the visit that influenced the setting of All the Light We Cannot See)
  • I think the relevance is establishing the context, within the author's oeuvre, from which the work arises. Did it just pop out of his head, or does it represent a continuation, development or repudiation of what he wrote before? In the interests of comprehensiveness, it would be good to set out (if only briefly) what Doerr's literary story looks like at the beginning of this article's narrative. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 11:15, 11 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Lazman321 (talk) 22:27, 10 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
You know what, I'm withdrawing the candidacy. I underestimated how busy I would be over the summer, so I don't see myself finishing this candidacy at the present moment, especially considering what UndercoverClassicist is asking me to do about the background section, which seems esoteric to be honest. I will propose the article again once I have more time on my hands. Lazman321 (talk) 17:01, 19 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@FAC coordinators: FYI on the withdrawal. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:05, 19 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

To piggyback on this comment, possible sources not cited include:

  • Goh, Irving (2019). "Introducing Touching Literature: Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See". CR: The New Centennial Review. 19 (3): 241–264. doi:10.14321/crnewcentrevi.19.3.0241.
  • Schaumann, Bridget. "All the Light We cannot See." Collected Magazine, no. 15, Apr. 2015, p. 19. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A419764176/AONE?u=anon~8d8f9e39&sid=googleScholar&xid=1f41d02a. Accessed 3 July 2023.
  • Damian, Mihaela Marieta (2022). "The Metaphor of Light – Perspectives on Conceptual Metaphors. Case Study on Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See". Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica. 14 (3): 92–106.
  • Crandell, Allan E. (2015). "All the Light We Cannot Seeby Anthony Doerr; New York, Scribner, 2014, 530 pages". Psychiatric Services. 66 (12): e6–e6. doi:10.1176/appi.ps.661207.
  • Mengqi, Jin (2023). "The Tragedy of War -- A Neorealism Interpretation of All the Lights We Cannot See". International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences (IJELS). 8 (3).
  • Collard, David. "Seeing the light." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5803, 20 June 2014, p. 20. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A683925863/AONE?u=anon~bfebc6e&sid=googleScholar&xid=cd316860. Accessed 3 July 2023.

I wouldn't consider the article comprehensive without examining scholarly sources. Most likely all can be accessed with TWL or WP:RX. (t · c) buidhe 00:04, 4 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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