The User's Guide to Phil-Lit

Welcome to PHIL-LIT, the electronic discussion group of Philosophy and Literature. Here is the User's Guide to the list at www.andreas.com/phil-lit. Please bookmark or write down this URL for future reference.

If you have any questions, please contact the list's technical moderator:

• Andreas Ramos andreas@andreas.com.

You can also contact D. G. Myers dgmyers@tamu.edu.

Contents

1. Email Addresses: How to Post to the List
2. Commands: How to Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Change Your Settings, and so on
3. Guidelines: Rules for the List
4. Database Searches: Searching the Archives
5. Governing Structure of Phil-Lit

Preface

PHIL-LIT was created on March 3, 1994, to accompany Philosophy and Literature, the interdisciplinary journal published by Whitman College and Johns Hopkins University Press. It was started by Denis Dutton, the editor of Philosophy and Literature, and D. G. Myers of Texas A&M University. In September 1995, Stephen Ogden of Simon Fraser University took over for a two-year term; and in July 1997, Andreas Ramos became the principal day-to-day administrator. Together the four developed PHIL-LIT as an electronic symposium devoted to the same sort of topics covered by the journal: philosophical interpretations of literature, literary investigations of classic works of philosophy, the aesthetics of literature, philosophy of language relevant to literature, and the theory of criticism. Like the journal, PHIL-LIT owes allegiance to no particular school or style of criticism or philosophy.

Subscriptions to Philosophy and Literature cost $22 a year. Write to:

Johns Hopkins University Press
Journals Division
2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, MD USA 21218-4319
jlorder@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu

To purchase a subscription by Visa or MasterCharge via e-mail send the name of the journal, length of subscription, credit card number, expiration date, and your name, address, and phone number to jlorder@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu

1: Email Addresses

To send a message to the entire list:

• phil-lit@listserv.tamu.edu

To send a command to the listserver in order to change your options:

• listserv@listserv.tamu.edu

There is a difference between the two addresses. Use phil-lit@listserv.tamu.edu to write to other people. Use listserv@listserv.tamu.edu to send a command to the computer that manages the list.
If you send commands to everyone, your command will not be read or used by the computer.

When in doubt, contact the list's technical moderator.

2: Commands

Send all of the following messages to listserv@listserv.tamu.edu.

To subscribe:

• SUBSCRIBE PHIL-LIT Your Name

(For example, SUBSCRIBE PHIL-LIT James Joyce)

To sign off:

• UNSUBSCRIBE PHIL-LIT

N.B.: This message must be sent from the address at which you originally subscribed. If you changed addresses, contact the list's technical moderator (see the top of this page.)

A single request to the PHIL-LIT computer can provide you with a daily anthology of all PHIL-LIT messsages. This means that you receive only one message per day from PHIL-LIT. You may then browse through these at leisure. This is called "digest mode."

To set to Digest mode:

• SET PHIL-LIT DIGEST

To suspend delivery of messages without signing off:

• SET PHIL-LIT NOMAIL

To return to regular delivery:

• SET PHIL-LIT MAIL

You do not normally see a copy of your own postings. To see your own postings:

• SET PHIL-LIT REPRO

To stop receiving copies of your own postings:

• SET PHIL-LIT ACK NOREPRO

To put a stop to advisory messages indicating that your posting has been distributed to the list:

• SET PHIL-LIT NOACK NOREPRO

Again, send these commands to listserv@listserv.tamu.edu. If you have a problem send a message privately to the list's technical moderator--not the whole list.

N.B.: Sometimes it happens that subscribers are "auto-deleted" by the listserv computer, because messages cannot be delivered for various reasons. If you find that you are not receiving messages from PHIL-LIT--and there are always several messages per day--contact the technical moderator privately.

3: Guidelines

These guidelines are the rules of the list. All other guidelines are superceded by this page.

• PHIL-LIT is devoted to the discussion of philosophy and literature. This includes related literary, social, historical, or intellectual topics.
• All contributions should be signed with your full name and affiliation or hometown.
• If you contribute to a discussion, please stay with the discussion until the end. Posting a message and not following up is like running onto a stage to interrupt a play.
• If you are new to the list, please follow a discussion thread for a while before contributing to it.
• No personal attacks: Focus on the issue, not your opponent. If you violate the spirit of this rule, you may be warned or removed from the list.
• No posting of private emails. If you receive a private message and then post it to the entire list for the purpose of ridicule or even mere refutation you will be immediately removed from the list.
• If you feel personally attacked or insulted, DO NOT RESPOND PUBLICLY. Your response may provoke an escalation of back-and-forth insults.
• If you annoy others, several things may happen. First, people will complain to the moderators and you may get a warning. Second, the moderators will advise people, either privately or publicly, how they can set their email software to automatically delete your postings, so nobody sees what you write. You will be talking in an empty room. Third, if you continue to annoy others, you may be deleted from the list. If you want to continue to post, then consider how others may feel about your postings.
• Decisions by the moderators are final and do not require notification, justification, or explanation. The moderator may change the rules at any time. You are a guest on this list. By subscribing to the list, you accept the rules and you accept that your right to post may be revoked at any time, without explanation or warning.
• Post a new message only when you have something new to contribute to the discussion.
• Do not copy and re-send the message to which you are replying. Quote, paraphrase, copy and paste, or cite your correspondent by name; give as much of the context as you can in order to clarify the nature of your reply. But do not forward a duplicate copy of an entire earlier message, which is particularly annoying to those who use the digest option for PHIL-LIT and may have to wade through the same message four or five times.
• The subject line in your message should be as accurate and informative as possible.
• General complaints--about the tone, direction, or appropriateness of a "thread," about "regulars" who post frequently to the list, about the nature of Phil-Lit discussions as such, and other 'meta-list' issues--belong on META-PHIL-LIT, the sister list expressly devoted to such issues. To sign up, see the end of this page.
• If you have a problem with anyone on the list--if, for example, you receive an abusive message from a Phil-Litter or if you think someone is posting inappropriate messages--please contact the moderator.
• If you have questions, technical problems, and so on, contact the list's technical moderator.

4: Database Searches

PHIL-LIT is archived daily. You can easily search the archive logs for past topics. You send listserv a brief program, commanding it to search the list's archives for a word, term, or name (defined as a "string" as in "string of characters"). Here's what to do. Send to listserv@listserv.tamu.edu the following:

• SEARCH "string" IN PHIL-LIT

(For example, SEARCH Waste Land IN PHIL-LIT)

(You can use upper case or lower case. It doesn't matter. search waste land in phil-lit is also okay.)

You can refine the search even further. If you are not sure, for instance, what Eliot's poem might have been called in the post you want, you can write this search command instead:

• SEARCH Waste Land OR Wasteland IN PHIL-LIT

If you remember the author's name--if you remember, for instance, that Amy Schwartz posted a parody of _The Waste Land_ some time ago--you might send the command

• SEARCH Waste Land OR Wasteland AND Schwartz IN PHIL-LIT

Tip: Since we ask everyone to sign their posts, the easiest way to find someone's postings is to include their name as part of the search string. Check one of their emails to see how they sign their name, and then use that as part of the search string. For example, SEARCH Waste Land OR Wasteland AND Amy AND Schwartz IN PHIL-LIT. Since the archives go back to 1994, it's best to include a date limit, such as SEARCH Waste Land OR Wasteland AND Amy AND Schwartz IN PHIL-LIT since 02/01/15 (that's 2002/01/15, or 2002/January/15th.)

You can search by including the sender's name. (Note: this sometimes doesn't work. See the tip above.)

• SEARCH Waste Land IN PHIL-LIT WHERE SENDER CONTAINS Schwartz

You can search for every post by the address of a particular author:

• SEARCH * IN PHIL-LIT WHERE SENDER IS schwartz@harvard.edu

(Note: This also sometimes doesn't work, since the sender's email address may not be identical to the server's email address. See the tip above.)

The notational convention here is to use an asterisk (*) to represent everything and anything.

You can limit your searches by date:

• SEARCH Waste Land IN PHIL-LIT SINCE 94/01/01

The date is year/month/day.

You can limit your searches by subject:

• SEARCH * IN PHIL-LIT WHERE SUBJECT CONTAINS Waste Land

Or you can combine methods:

• SEARCH * IN PHIL-LIT SINCE 94/01/01 WHERE SUBJECT CONTAINS Waste Land

By return mail Listserv will send you a list of "hits" (postings found), not the postings themselves. For example:

004803 94/12/22 11:10   61   Holiday fare
006181 95/03/04 10:46   44   Getting the Waste Land parody
006198 95/03/06 18:01   73   Wasteland Parody

To retrieve the postings, send the following command to listserv:

• GETPOST PHIL-LIT 4803 6181 6198

(N.B.: Since these examples have been cited in the User's Guide since practically the beginning of Phil-Lit time, *these* searches will net every copy of the User's Guide that has ever been posted to the list.)

• GETPOST PHIL-LIT 4803 6181 6198

If you get many hits, such as:

GETPOST PHIL-LIT 4803 6181 6198 6208 6322 6447 6549 
7623 7727 8116 8283 8398 8561 8768 9148 9290 9610 
10245 10490 10681 10911 11063 11212 11613 11794 12102 

then you'll need to include a command on each line when you send it back. Send the following:

GETPOST PHIL-LIT 4803 6181 6198 6208 6322 6447 6549 
GETPOST PHIL-LIT 7623 7727 8116 8283 8398 8561 8768 
GETPOST PHIL-LIT 10245 10490 10681 10911 11063 11212 

As always, these programs and commands need to be sent to listserv@listserv.tamu.edu and not the list itself.

5: The Governance of PHIL-LIT

The Moderators:

• Andreas Ramos andreas@andreas.com, who gave up the big money in graduate philosophy to become a technical writer in the Silicon Valley, is the list's technical moderator. He can help when your Phil-Lit mail suddenly ceases to arrive, you have trouble changing default settings, and so forth.
• D. G. Myers dgmyers@tamu.edu, Associate Professor in the Department of English at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, is the list's moderator.

Meta-Phil-Lit