Literary Prestige Research Articles

Empathic Engagement and Aesthetic Appreciation Between Readers’ Ethnicity and Narratives’ Literary Prestige

Empathic Engagement and Aesthetic Appreciation Between Readers’ Ethnicity and Narratives’ Literary Prestige

The Deceived: Lope de Rueda and Improvisation on the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Stage

ABSTRACT Lope de Rueda’s plays, among them Los engañados (The Deceived, 1558?), met great acclaim among contemporaneous audiences. Yet unlike the continued literary prestige enjoyed by the play’s Italian source, Gl’ingannati (The Deceived, 1532), Rueda’s work has been reduced to a sidenote in literary history. Such a decline in the author-actor’s critical fate speaks to the importance of physical performance to his popularity: performance that, this article argues, did not rely on memorized written dialogue. Through a comparison of Los engañados and Gl’ingannati, this article hopes to demonstrate that—plot aside—the Spanish play bears closer resemblance to the improvised Italian plays of the commedia dell’arte than it does to the scripted Gl’ingannati. An analysis of the work’s structure in the light of studies on commedia dell’arte scenarios, and the elements of orality found in its dialogue that imply spontaneous composition, shows Rueda’s play to carry all of the hallmarks of improvisation. As such, this article suggests that improvisation must be recognized as a production mode of early modern theatre well beyond the borders of the Italian peninsula.

Reproducing disciplinary and literary prestige: “The index of major literary prizes in the US”

Reproducing disciplinary and literary prestige: “The index of major literary prizes in the US”

За кирилицата като шрифт на Балканите през XV–XVI век

The author explores the following issues: the differing graphical systems of the early print Cyrillic fonts and their role in establishing common identity through achieving cultural unity in graphical diversity. The paper provides conclusions about the types of orthographic systems (the Tarnovo two-nasal system and the Raška and Resava systems); the graphical inventory of individual editions according to selected differential features; the areal and cultural specifics of the studied editions. The author argues that the early print Cyrillic fonts functioned as a sign and information system and a cultural phenomenon that upheld tradition and rein-forced its literary prestige.

“We know nothing except through style”: John Banville’s worldliness

ABSTRACT John Banville identifies style as an attribute of world literature. As a novelist, he admires authors who make wit, word play, linguistic theatricality and virtuosity literary ends in themselves. In reviews and articles, he praises Henry James, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Chandler, and other writers for their highly polished prose styles. In turn, critics single out Banville’s own finely tuned style as the defining trait of his novels. Invoking world literature theory, this essay works towards a definition of literary style and more particularly Irish style, such as Banville perceives it. As an aspect of world literature, certain novels display “extensibility,” which is to say that they borrow from and build upon prior novels, not just by repurposing characters, but also by adopting premises, situations, vocabularies, and style. Banville creates extensions of Nabokov’s Lolita in The Untouchable, James’s The Portrait of a Lady in Mrs Osmond, and Chandler’s detective novels in The Black-Eyed Blonde, published under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. Through such extensions, Banville elaborates a world style that enhances literary prestige and contributes to the system of world literature.

The Politics of Literary Prestige: Prizes and Spanish American Literature by Sarah E. L. Bowskill

Reviewed by: The Politics of Literary Prestige: Prizes and Spanish American Literature by Sarah E. L. Bowskill Will H. Corral SARAH E. L. BOWSKILL The Politics of Literary Prestige: Prizes and Spanish American Literature New York. Bloomsbury Academic. 2022. 215 pages. SARAH E. L. BOWSKILL'S succinct study deals properly with the "never-ending network" discussed in her eighth and last chapter, which is ultimately the ample partisan positioning that is the subtext of the Spanish-language literary prizes she analyzes. In a 1981 press release on the misfortune of being a young writer, Gabriel García Márquez, no stranger to prizes and aware that they reveal who readers perceive as your peers, regrets young writers' "almost childish enthusiasm" [End Page 94] for national awards and fashionable fame. For him, with those prizes the publisher "not only mugs the novice writer, but the publisher uses [him] to become richer with little effort." Bowskill examines the politics behind such machinations, and her fine introduction encapsulates her methodology and goals. Her first chapter evaluates the relation among literary prizes, controversy, and the state in Spanish America; the second, how Spanish publishers intensified their cultural and economic influence during the Franco years with awards to Spanish American authors. In a strict chronology of those developments, the first chapter should follow the second, followed by the fifth (on Spain's Biblioteca Breve prize and "the forgotten women of the Boom," rightly rescuing "Ana Mairena" and Nivaria Tejera), even though the sixth chapter, "Women Winning Prizes: A No-Win Situation?" dovetails smoothly from the previous one, asserting that prizes are no country for younger women. This redistribution is as academic as The Politics of Literary Prestige but reinforces Bowskill's optimistic view of the relatively unknown writers she marshals in the seventh chapter, "Prizes for Literatures in Indigenous Languages." Evidently a sociological study (Pierre Bourdieu is ever-present) conceptually framed by James English's The Economy of Prestige, Bowskill has a fine eye for detail and information that may seem "gossipy." Her attention and dependence on digital resources, charts, and archives is impressive, leading her to conclude that "As the prize network colonizes more and more positions in the literary and political fields, there remain few options for authors wishing to remain beyond the network," although she avers that "caution must also be exercised when proclaiming the freedoms of publishing online as this space is increasingly colonized by corporations using our data for profit." Her ideological stance is well considered when ChatGPT could write books, or this review, and the humanities are losing prestige. At this state of the art, likening literary and political fields, or emphasizing "colonization," is better served by questioning the dependence on those terms, for concrete and ideological reasons. If Spanish America has not yet produced a Sherman Alexie, who writes in English, what network would judge literature in what Indigenous languages? Would such a web replicate the wheeling and dealing of mainstream prizes based on "a discourse of globalization rooted in Europe," in which exoticism and condescending attitudes still prevail? What to do with scandal-ridden prizes like the Planeta, or that since 1969 only six women have won the Anagrama prize, facts absent in Bowskill's analysis? She is right that women-only prizes or "the transcultural, transnational pan-Hispanic identity created and envisaged by the Premio Alfaguara" are not the solution as a counterdiscourse to anglophone acculturation. For the Colombian Héctor Abad Faciolince, who has lost prizes for over forty years, the statistics for gender equity, "official literatures," and conspiracy theories prove the senselessness of affirmative-action solutions for Spanish America. For the fourth chapter—which seeks common ground among Roberto Bolaño, Carmen Boullosa, and Fernando Iwasaki, writers with vastly different talents, as the reception of the latter two shows—putting in perspective other writers could have benefitted from Discípulos y maestros 2.0: Novela hispanoamericana hoy, much of which deals with emerging novelists' ethics vis-à-vis contests; and an earlier compilation, The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel: After Bolaño, which contextualizes almost all the recent novelists Bowskill discusses. If she proposes the notion of "network" to understand how prizes shape a wider literary...

Christian Felix Weiße the Translator: Cultural Transfer and Literary Entrepreneurship in the Enlightenment by Tom Zille

Reviewed by: Christian Felix Weiße the Translator: Cultural Transfer and Literary Entrepreneurship in the Enlightenment by Tom Zille Caroline Summers Christian Felix Weiße the Translator: Cultural Transfer and Literary Entrepreneurship in the Enlightenment. By Tom Zille. London: IMLR Research. 2021. xiii+221 pp. £25. ISBN 978–0–85457–273–1. This first monograph from Tom Zille explores the extensive translation output and literary influence of the Enlightenment writer Christian Felix Weiße (1726–1804). It is the first published volume in English on Weiße's work, and it offers a detailed study of his contribution to Anglo-German relations and translation culture in a period that saw the emergence of professional translation and the modern book trade, along with 'the accelerating evolution of the German literary idiom' (p. 7). Zille delivers a carefully researched microhistory, with a focus on substantial analysis of Weiße's unpublished correspondence that generates much to interest book historians, translation scholars, and modern translators. The study is not primarily concerned with theoretical approaches, but Germany's complex intercultural relationships with its European neighbours are explored through a broad focus on the question of cultural transfer. This is a concept that has made some inroads in Translation Studies, including recent work not mentioned by Zille such as Maud Gonne, Klaartje Merrigan, Reine Meylaerts, and Heleen van Gerwen's Transfer Thinking in Translation Studies: Playing with the Black Box of Cultural Transfer (Leuven: Leuven University Press 2020). Weiße's correspondence reveals the complex interests that shape intercultural mediation and offers insights into the newly marketized field of literary translation, for example through his criticism of the 'Raubsucht der Übersetzer' (p. 31) who take great liberties with their texts or demonstrate limited knowledge of the source language. Some space is given to scrutiny of Weiße's own translations, allowing an illustration of his developing translation strategy. Zille explores how Weiße negotiated contemporary debates on translation, navigating binaries of stylistic accuracy versus target-language fluency or equivalent effect versus literalness that continue to preoccupy the field. While Translation Studies scholars may find themselves frustrated by a lack of theoretical context and the seeming self-evidence of comments on the 'success' (or otherwise) of Weiße's translation choices, such textual analysis allows an exploration of the blurred boundaries of the role of the translator, looking at the intersections between Weiße's translation and his original writing to show how translation might shape target-language usage. It is in the two chapters on networks and agency that Weiße's literary entrepreneurship is most compellingly presented. The correspondence reveals a powerful network of cultural influence, and in places the book reads like a Who's Who of eighteenth-century German literature (although Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is conspicuously absent). However, while Weiße enjoyed some illustrious connections, the letters also record the precarity of his various and intersecting roles as translator, writer, publisher, editor, commentator, educator, and literary advocate. The variety of texts he translated reflects an ongoing struggle to reconcile literary prestige with commercial viability, a dilemma that may be just as familiar to literary translators in the present day. The result is a robust portrait of a flesh-and-blood [End Page 273] translator, for whom translation is both a creative endeavour and a material necessity. This is a carefully researched and vivid account of eighteenth-century German culture that reveals the power and position of translators within a developing ecosystem of literary professionalism and intercultural relations. It would have been enriched by fuller engagement with the wider Translation Studies context: Zille acknowledges his focus specifically on translation debates contemporary to Weiße, but it is surprising that there is no nod even towards ideas about foreignization (Friedrich Schleiermacher) or Weltliteratur (Goethe) that would begin to circulate in Germany almost immediately after Weiße's death, or to the ongoing discourse on both these issues that continues to characterize debates in Translation Studies and beyond. There is also certainly more to be said about how Weiße's work maps onto established and more recent theories of translator agency and networks. However, what emerges powerfully from the study is...

The Literary Prestige of Censorship: The Case of Naked Lunch

By tracing the publication history of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, this article shows how the gate-keeping mechanism of censorship can facilitate literary prestige. The release of the Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch in 1966 after two obscenity trials marked the end of complete literary censorship in the US and was a crucial step towards the canonization of underground authors. By making it necessary to argue on behalf of the text’s form, the obscenity trials helped in framing Burroughs’s arguably “formless” text as both a coherent work and a work of high literary merit. The article offers a detailed account of the enabling role of censorship in the case of Naked Lunch, which consisted not only in generating the interest of underground publishers (Olympia Press in Paris and Grove Press in the US) but also in helping Burroughs’s formless, fragmented text take shape and as a novel.

The writer Son Khanh in the literary field of Southern Vietnam from 1945 to 1950

Son Khanh is often mentioned in studies about Southern Vietnamese fighting literature from 1945 to 1950, but his literary career has been rarely studied separately due to his short years of writing and the shadow of his political career. However, his works still formed a literary style, not outstanding but no so shaded either, among many writers of the patriotic writing movement that first and foremost served the ideals of liberating the country from the French colony and reuniting Vietnam. Moreover, the position of Son Khanh in the literary circle back then can be analyzed from factors other than those from literature. Geo-cultural characteristics of Southern Vietnam and political incidents that happened there from 1945 to 1950 created an extremely outward literature. Applied the theory of “field” proposed by Pierre Bourdieu, this article analyzes how poticial, economic, aesthetic powers affected Son Khanh’s choices in writing and how he utilized his political, economic, asthetic capitals to build up his literary prestige and to move up in the literary field in Southern Vietnam from 1945 to 1950.

Joyce and his Apostles: The Exchange of Capital between Joyce and transition

In the interwar Parisian literary field, transition was among the most influential expatriate magazines, promoting forms of new, avant-garde literature. Its main feature was the serialisation of James Joyce’s Work in Progress, which was to be published as Finnegans Wake in 1939. Joyce and transition had become closely connected to each other through their literary exchange and the representation of Joyce by transition was beneficial to both the author’s and the literary magazine’s success. Simultaneously, Sylvia Beach, the owner of the bookshop Shakespeare and Company, represented a key factor to both of their careers. This paper interprets these exchanges through the Bourdieusian framework of symbolic capital, arguing that their involvement with each other could be regarded as not just an exchange of literary merit, but also of power, as through their positions in the literary field Joyce and transition, with the help of Beach, were able to substantially influence each other’s literary careers and prestige.

Quantifying Quality: A Computational Approach to Literary Value in North Korea

AbstractThis article analyzes questions of literary production and literary value in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) using quantitative methods and data sets covering a significant part of the country's literary and intellectual output over forty years (1977–2016). The first part of the article adopts a thematic approach, using topic modeling and time series, to map the DPRK's literary output and investigate the influence of genre on literary consecration. The second part looks at questions of style and literary quality in the DPRK through a comparative analysis of multiple novels grouped by degree of literary prestige. It introduces a method to evaluate the originality of an author's writing style using a masked language model (BERT) and uses it to assess the role of conformity and originality in the DPRK's literary field. Even though writers consecrated by the state display a high level of stylistic conformity when writing mandated biographies of the ruling family, their independent output ranks higher in originality than nonconsecrated writers.

Theorie und Methode der Gattungsgeschichtsschreibung.Mediävistische Perspektiven

Theorie und Methode der Gattungsgeschichtsschreibung.<b>Mediävistische Perspektiven</b>

La Conversation Transatlantique: Les échanges Franco-Américains en Poésie Depuis 1968

La Conversation Transatlantique: Les échanges Franco-Américains en Poésie Depuis 1968

The Difference an Editor Makes

The Difference an Editor Makes

Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and the International Booker Prize: reading with and against world literary prestige

ABSTRACT In 2016, the English-language translation of Han Kang’s 2007 novel The Vegetarian was awarded the Booker group’s International Prize for fiction. Although reviewers have tended to interpret the novel’s plot pessimistically, as a perilous descent into starvation, literary critics have argued that The Vegetarian dramatises an ecofeminist refusal of carnism and patriarchy. Yet both of these interpretations neglect crucial textual and extra-textual features of Han’s novel. In fact, the text’s generic and narrative ambiguities on the one side, and its celebrated position within contemporary world literary publishing culture on the other, suggest that there are limits to reading The Vegetarian as a radically posthumanist tale of becoming-plant. This essay therefore reconsiders The Vegetarian in light of its narrative form and its incorporation into the world literary canon. By doing this I will not only complicate existing close readings of Han Kang’s work. I will also develop literary-sociological analyses of prize-giving and the publishing industry, while at the same time interrogating the extent to which contemporary literature challenges and becomes folded into global capital.

The Poet and the Philanthropists: William Chapman's Aspirational Bid for the Nobel Prize

French Canadian poet William Chapman is generally dismissed as second-rate imitator of Lamartine, Hugo or his compatriot Louis Fréchette. Chapman's bitter feud with Fréchette has been – much more than the five collections of verse he published between 1876 and 1912 – his claim to fame. Despite being at odds with his North American contemporaries, Chapman was indefatigable in his pursuit of literary prestige. Chapman's quest for literary honours including the Nobel Prize, while it has thus far attracted the derision of critics, in fact provides context for a deeper understanding of his poetic practice within the shifting philanthropic landscape of the turn of the century. Close readings of two of Chapman's poems, ‘À M. Andrew Carnegie’ and ‘Nobel’, alongside contemporary journalistic sources, point to a new understanding of Chapman's considerable body of occasional verse and of Chapman himself as a savvy professional attuned to the developing ‘economy of prestige’.

Ensoñación y realidad en la Epístola V, al excelentísimo Señor Conde de Lemos, Presidente de Indias

RESUMEN: En la Epístola V dedicada al Conde de Lemos, Lope propone un juego de máscaras y de personas, de sujetos reales y de configuraciones ficcionales a efectos de recuperar el favor de su antiguo mecenas. La intencionalidad del mensaje se manifiesta a través de una fantasía alegórica concretizada en el plano onírico. En la dialéctica realidad/ensoñación, Lope aborda las tensiones entre el prestigio literario y la pobreza apremiante, entre la autoexaltación y el descrédito público, entre la experiencia vivencial y la creación poética. Autobiografía y proyecto literario se fusionan, una vez más, para enaltecer a un Lope que, a pesar de todo y contra todos, se ufana de ser poeta. ABSTRACT: In Epistle V dedicated to the count of Lemos, Lope proposes a game of masks and people, real subjects and fictional configurations in order to regain the favor of his former patron. The intentionality of the message is manifested through an allegorical fantasy concretized in the dream plane. In the dialectic reality / reverie, Lope addresses the tensions between literary prestige and pressing poverty, between self-exaltation and public discredit, between experiential experience and poetic creation. Autobiography and literary project merge, once again, to praise a Lope who, despite everything and against everyone, prides himself on being a poet

Mending “the injurie of oblivion”: “Englishing” Chaucer and Barbour in early printed editions

This article examines the editorial choices made in Edinburgh printer Andro Hart’s 1616 edition of John Barbour’s Brus. Comparison of the 1616 Hart edition with Thomas Speght’s 1602 Chaucer edition displays similar concerns with preserving accessibility to historical texts despite significant language changes in both Older Scots and English, noting shared employment of assistive paratextual apparati. Linguistic assessment comparing Hart and Speght’s editions to their parent texts demonstrates how both editors modernize language to improve reader accessibility while preserving archaic qualities and metricality. Contextualization of the declining prestige of Older Scots during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries further clarifies this assessment. Hart’s edition portrays both a genesis of mutual intelligibility between Scots and English, and a coda for Older Scots as a literary prestige tongue.

"Are They Going to Say This Is Fantasy?": Kazuo Ishiguro, Untimely Genres, and the Making of Literary Prestige

"Are They Going to Say This Is Fantasy?": Kazuo Ishiguro, Untimely Genres, and the Making of Literary Prestige

La construcción del prestigio literario en Colombia. El caso de Mario Mendoza, Jorge Franco y Santiago Gamboa

Esta investigación pretende caracterizar las trayectorias editoriales de Mario Mendoza, Jorge Franco, Santiago Gamboa y determinar las fuentes del prestigio literario entre los narradores colombianos contemporáneos. ¿Qué relación hay entre la construcción del prestigio literario y los sellos editoriales que publican sus obras? Se busca analizar el lugar que ocupan otras fuentes de prestigio literario en las trayectorias literarias de los autores citados: premios, circulación, difusión en la prensa, trayectorias académicas