It's possible that the site floundered and closed because it just wasn't a good fit for the StackExchange model. Literature doesn't strike me as a field where there are obvious right answers.
There are plenty of right answers and more than plenty of wrong answers. Literature and other "soft" fields are not so different from math and science.
Right, so we study math for the twin reasons of wanting to learn mathematical language and wanting to understand our place in the universe, which turns out to be precisely why we also study literature: to learn about language and to understand our place in the universe. Which by the way, Hank, gets to the thing that make me angriest in the entire world, which is when people say that there is only one right answer in math, but that every answer is equally correct in literature.
First off, there is often more than one correct answer in math, and secondly NOT EVERY ANSWER IS EQUALLY CORRECT IN LITERATURE!
For instance, Hank, if you think that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a pro-slavery novel, you’re wrong! You’re as wrong as you are if you think that the square root of four is strawberries!
Like you, I strongly reject the idea that literature means anything and everything the reader wants it to. Nobody really believes that, even if they say they do. Just try interpreting the English professor's exam directions however you like and see what happens.
However, you must admit that there is some subjectivity involved in literature. Maybe no more than in programmers.stackexchange. But that has the benefit of spillover from StackOverflow, where the right answer proves itself by executing correctly.
That's an interesting point and I agree with what you say for a simple question and answer. But there may be just as much subjectivity in the "right" answer for a complicated problem.
What if it compiles but gives erroneous results? What if it compiles and gives correct results, except for a certain day of the year? (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4128208). What if it compiles and runs and always gives the correct results no matter what, but isn't as efficiently written as it could be?
