»Wer konkurriert womit worum?« Ein neues Literaturpreis-Modell

Abstract

Literary prizes are a phenomenon of twentieth century. Notably, they have become vastly numerous in German speaking area in the course of the last four decades. Extensive research over several years has shown that for analyzing literary awards comprehensively necessarily more actors have to be considered than sole presenting organizations and authors. In order to cover all relevant aspects of literary awards, another four kind of actors have to be taken into account, namely financial sponsors or backers, judges, employees of publishing houses and ›pure‹ readers, i. e. public itself. In the beginning literary prizes are put threefold into broader context of literary research: they are presented historically, contextually, i. e. as a certain kind of literature promotion, and conceptually. After, research into literary awards, and, until now sole existing, descriptive model of awards will be thoroughly discussed. Subsequently, a new three-part approach will be presented: first component are six kinds of actors modeled as competitors, i. e. they are characterized within two dimensions of their specific means of competition and competition objectives. Second component are two temporal dimensions for describing literary awards diachronic and asynchronic. By this, several sequential awarding ceremonies of one prize as well as simultaneous bestowals of different awards, and related actions of competitors, can be correlated and analyzed. Third part is Bourdieus concept of ›literary field‹. There is clear evidence that representatives of all six kinds of actors mentioned above, valuating cultural capital and in some sense discourages economic capital. This has been stipulated by Bourdieu as a principal characteristic of participants of all kinds of cultural fields, thus, of the literary one, too. Two conflicts in 1959/60, and 1979/80, respectively, are important for history of Bremen Literature Prize. By discussing both at length advantages of a diachronic view on literary awards will become lucid. Likewise, dispute about use of the name Thomas Mann for two different literary prizes in 2008 and 2009 shows unambiguosly: Not sole investigations into actions of authors and members of presenting institutions are indispensable for an in-depth understanding of literary awards. For such, it is also necessary that one can model frictions between representatives of different prize awards organizations. Furthermore, possible causes for failure of an award, for instance that wished effects do not materialize, will be probed. Finally, financing of literary awards also has been investigated extensively. Findings of this work are almost completely based on sources from and documents about presenting organizations. Their systematic evaluation has made clear which goals and means are important at all for representatives of all six kinds of actors. Possibly, however, knowledge about other actors can still be expanded decisively by studying further sources about authors, financial sponsors or backers, judges, employees of publishing houses and ›pure‹ readers themselves.