Literary Prizes Research Articles

Diasporic Papers

Abstract This article explores the impact of the Nobel Prize in Literature on the acquisition policies of literary archives. Focusing on laureates and the twenty-first-century fate of their manuscripts, it argues that the international reach of the prize is mirrored by a contemporary archival landscape that is at once global and unequal. Although many archives concentrate on collecting material from the linguistic and cultural context of which they themselves form part, the past two decades have also seen the emergence of a competitive international market for the papers of authors whose writings are marked – through high-profile distinctions such as the Nobel Prize – as belonging to the world literary canon. Illustrating its larger argument with the help of three case studies (Harold Pinter, J.M. Coetzee, Gabriel García Márquez), the article suggests that archivization consecrates laureates’ papers as global heritage at the same time that it reinforces the logic of literary nativism.

The Indie Nobel?

Abstract The work of nine of the last ten non-Anglophone winners of the Nobel Prize in literature is – or, in a few cases, was – mainly published in the United States and the United Kingdom by independent publishers. This essay draws on the resources of the interdisciplinary field of valuation studies to show that this phenomenon is not only a reflection of commercial considerations but also reveals differences in the way the Nobel Committee, independent publishers, and conglomerate publishers articulate literary value. Paying special attention to the discourses of justification around J.M.G. Le Clézio, the essay shows how the Committee’s emphasis on documentation, truth, and witness gets refracted in, on the one hand, a focus on serious and melancholic postures of witness in the literary value discourse characterizing the New York-centered literary upmarket segment, and a celebration of cross-cultural curiosity in the case of independent publishers on the other.

The Nobel Literature Prize and Peacebuilding

Abstract Organized as part of the Cultural Olympiad for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, “The Nobel Laureates of Literature: An Olympic Gathering” featured the largest ever assembly of Nobel laureates in literature for a single occasion. It was expected that the eight writers in attendance, namely Joseph Brodsky, Czesław Miłosz, Toni Morrison, Kenzaburō Ōe, Octavio Paz, Claude Simon, Wole Soyinka, and Derek Walcott, would singularly promote the values of peacebuilding. Instead, the laureates demonstrated varying degrees of uneasiness. By close-reading the panel discussion transcript in conjunction with the writers’ Nobel lectures, this paper argues for an alternative reading of the Olympic Gathering as a platform where the artistic visions of the eight writers interacted with each other on topics related to mutual understanding, privacy, and communication. Rather than reinforcing the liturgy of global peacebuilding, the Nobel laureates transformed the Olympic Gathering into a critical space that simultaneously promotes and deconstructs its peacebuilding processes.

Animal representations in Margaret Atwood’s novels: a study based on pan-indexicality model

Abstract Margaret Atwood is a Canadian author of more than thirty-five books and the winner of prestigious literary prizes, such as the Booker Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Governor General’s Award. Her influence on Canadian literature and contemporary literature as a whole is phenomenal. Nevertheless, little is known with respect to how Atwood represents animals covering the full range of her novels. This paper reports on the analysis of animal representations in Atwood’s seventeen novels through Python programming and close reading under the framework of a new semiotic research finding, a pan-indexicality model within the context of literature and the environment. This study investigates the frequencies of animal vocabulary in the seventeen novels, the changes of animal representations in her novels before 1990s and after 1990s, and the implication of the ever-changing animal representations during the fifty years. This paper concludes that nonhuman animal descriptions in Atwood’s novels of 1970s and 1980s run at a high level and decrease in her novels of 1990s, while scientific animal descriptions increase in her novels of 2000s and 2010s. Nonhuman animals in her novels of 1970s and 1980s are instrumentalized as a vehicle for indigenization and national individuation from the United States, and scientific animals in her novels of 2000s and 2010s are instrumentalized in the service of environmental apocalypticism. This study suggests that the pan-indexicality model can be employed to understand the meaning of signs in literature and the environment from the perspective of authorial intention, with reference to authors’ encyclopedic knowledge, personal experience, social, and cultural background information.

Ashkenazi Literary Diaspora in The Argentina Of the Junta Military: The Poetic Legacy of Juan Gelman, Tamara Kamenszain, Alicia Borinsky, And Alicia Kozameh

The following research intends to trace the tradition that was forged by the Ashkenazi literary Diaspora via a comprehensive examination of the work of four Argentinean Jewish poets of Eastern-European Ashkenazi descent [1]. All of whom were forced to leave Argentina and live in exile either in Mexico or the United States. During the period of Argentina’s last dictatorship (1976-1983) [2]. The nation was suspended within a dimension of viselike terror vis-à-vis countless encounters with the notorious Junta Military. The most notable manifestation of the Junta’s savagery was the alarming state of disquiet and subsequent “disappearance” of approximately 13,000 individuals perceived as a threat to the established order. A large percentage of the vanished faction were of Jewish origin as it is a prevailing anti-Semitic truism that Jews are viewed as intellectuals, and, as such, harbor Socialist leanings. Among these individuals are the four following poets, whose works were extensively awarded and honored: Alicia Borinsky [3]. Guggenheim Fellowship and Latino Literature Prize, Juan Gelman Juan Rulfo Award and Cervantes Prize, Tamara Kamenszain [4]. Guggenheim Fellowship and Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal, and Alicia Kozameh Argentine National Poetry Prize. The most obvious link between these four extraordinary individuals and writers is that they were all forced into exile either in Mexico or the United States, however, one cannot overlook other existing similarities, such as they are all Jewish, all individuals of Eastern-European Ashkenazi descent, and heirs to a body of work created by writers that were part of the Diaspora.

The Old Man and the Sea Revisited in a Linguistic Perspective

Hemingway’s novel The Old Man and the Sea was published in 1952 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature two years later. As an excellent work created by Hemingway, the language style of the Old Man and the Sea highlights Hemingway’s literary characteristics. He likes to use simple and colloquial language and flexible collocation of verbs and nouns to drive the plot development of the story, and then combine various rhetorical devices with his own language style to enrich the ideas of the whole novel. Many creative skills make the whole novel memorable, fully show the linguistic features of the Old Man and the Sea. From the perspective of linguistics, this paper analyzes the unique aesthetic style created by the powerful expression techniques in the novel. This paper analyzes the novel from two perspectives: linguistic features and metaphorical meaning. In terms of linguistic features, this paper mainly analyzes the concise language style, the ingenious use of personal pronouns and the appropriate code-switching. In terms of metaphorical meaning, this paper mainly analyzes the metaphorical meaning of the old man, the sea, the shark and marlin and the lion in this novel.

Del's Growth: A Typical Example of Construction of Female Self-consciousness—A Postmodern Feminist Analysis of Lives of Girls and Women

Alice Munro is a famous contemporary Canadian women writer and the winner of 2013 Nobel Prize in literature. She is known as the ""master of contemporary short stories"". Munro is very concerned about the life experience of ordinary women. She always focuses on the daily trifles and details of ordinary women and describes their journey from a girl to a wife in detail, especially focusing on the psychological fluctuations and twists and turns of women. They seem fragile, but they are persistent. Munro's works are full of postmodern feminism, focusing on women's self-awareness and subjective conscious construction.
 From the perspective of postmodern feminism, the thesis focuses on the gradual formation and evolution of the heroine's self-consciousness in Alice Munro's only ""full-length"" novel Lives of Girls and Women in the process of growing up from a girl to a woman, and how female images to jump out of the hierarchy, logical structure and linear narrative surrounded by men's words and begin to express own world.
 The introduction gives an overview of Alice Munro and the novel Lives of Girls and Women, literary reviews at home and abroad, some key elements in postmodern feminism, and the significance of this thesis.
 The body section consists of three chapters: Chapter One focuses on ""Del observes the adult life"". Through Del's observation, the life of Uncle Benny's wife, two aunts, her mother and the teacher unfolded. Chapter Two analyzes ""Self-consciousness of Del begins to construct"". Del gradually began to grow up. The awakening of sexual consciousness, the doubt of belief and the excavation of herself have gradually become the theme of this adolescent girl's life. Chapter Three revolves around ""Establishment and Perfection of her self-consciousness"". Finally, she got rid of her fantasy and self-deception, her past mistakes and perplexity, and left home to start her real life.
 The conclusion part summarizes that from the perspective of postmodern feminism, the self-growth and consciousness awakening of Del is how women break away from the role of ""good women"" who meet the social expectations and find their own real nature. Munro challenges the forces we take for granted and shakes the foundations of our lives. Women perceive the world in a way different from men and resist the grandeur of history with daily trivialities. Munro constructs women's value expresses her voice and embodies her choice of will by transcending feminism and returning to women's ontological experience.

Experts, Information, Reviews, and Coordination: Evidence on How Prizes Affect Sales*

Exploiting the award process, we implement a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of winning France's main literary prize, the Goncourt. It increases sales, especially for books that sold fewer copies before the announcement, the number of reviews on Amazon, and the probability of them being negative. The effect is partly driven by an increase in word of mouth. Those findings are consistent with a model where the prize provides information on the existence of a book and acts as a quality signal and a coordination device but prompts consumers to read books that are far from their tastes.

Doris Lessing's Personal Pilgrimage From Communism To Sufism

This paper chronicles Lessing's journey from her early involvement in the London Communist Party to her disillusionment with Marxist theory after the Hungarian crisis of 1956. It discusses her major works, such as "The Grass Is Singing" and "The Golden Notebook," which challenged traditional narrative structures and investigated the complexities of identity and consciousness. With vivid imagery and symbolism, the abstract highlights Lessing's ability to depict diverse domains, including colonial Africa, social disintegration, and mental breakdown. The contributions of Lessing to literature are recognised, and her unique perspective as a Marxist feminist author is emphasised. The abstract also discusses her 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature and her reactions to it, illuminating her independent and unyielding nature. Lessing's writing voyage paralleled her personal development throughout her life, from political activism to a profound exploration of inner and outer space, which ultimately led her to Sufism.

Loss of identity in T.S. Eliot's poems selected poems

T. S. Eliot is often regarded as one of the best writers of the 20th century. The realities and pain of modern civilization after war are embodied in his creative works dealing with the aftermath of war and loss of identity, which earn him the Nobel prize in literature. There are several poems by this author that capture the experience of the contemporary man. There are three parts to this paper. The first part of this essay discusses the life and work of T. S. Eliot, the critical acclaim that his works have received, and the prestigious literary award that he has won. In the second part, we look at what makes contemporary poetry distinct. How T. S. Eliot enhances the characteristics that current poets employ to produce their poetry. The third section is a collection of Eliot's poems that reflect on and depict modern human life and the modern man's loss of identity, including "The Hollow Man," "The Waste Land," and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," all of which were written after World War II. The poem "Prelude," which alludes to a musical overture to a contemporary day, is a perfect example. Eliot's poetry as a whole reflects the reality and sorrow of contemporary man's identity crisis. The study's conclusion summarizes its findings, which focused on how T.S. Eliot's poetry deals with themes of identity loss, the hardship of living, and solitude in the years after World War II.

Class Struggle and Feminist Character Transformation of Eliza Doolittle in Shaw’s Pygmalion

George Bernard Shaw depicts, the life of the British middle-class society of the Victorian era. He received the Noble Prize in Literature (1952) and the Oscar Award for his best writing and illustration of Pygmalion. In Pygmalion Shaw addresses class struggle, pronunciation trends, thematic interpretation feminist character transformation and stylistic patterns. Eliza’s inaccurate English spelling is due to a poor economic and social position in society. Shaw’s Pygmalion attracts the reader’s attention to the social class and female viewpoints. The characters of Dolittle’s highlights the idea of class conflict in British society during the Victorian era. Eliza is the ideal character example for the lost modern girl and that these lost females will take lessons from play and make a great transition to obtain dignity, confidence and equality. The character Higgins, who sees that passion for the perfect use of language as a prerequisite for one’s success, uses social influence to enforce his point of view to make the character Eliza embrace and live in compliance with his orders. Thus, Shaw’s Pygmalion shows the hard work of Eliza Doolittle, a flower girl, suffered from the male dominant society and becomes stronger independent women.

The Research of Culture-bounded Terms in the English Translation of Red Sorghum from the Perspective of Relevance Theory

Winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature gave Mo Yan an international repute. And the study of Howard Goldblatts translation of Mos work has become a trend. Previous studies have already taken various of perspectives to research Goldblatts translation texts, focusing on his translation strategies and the effects in the western world. As Red Sorghum is among the most popular novels of Mo Yan in the western world, this essay will take it as the research material to reveal Goldblatts translation strategy of Explicitation from the perspective of the Relevance Theory, and thus to conclude a feasible approach for translators to disseminate Chinese literature and culture to be seen and heard by the world. It creatively combines Explicitation in stylistics and the Relevance Theory to categorize the effects of the translation in three types: add dramatic effects, enhance the tone and make the words more vivid. The findings indicate that Explicitation is feature of Goldblatts translation work and it does take positive effects on the dissemination of Chinese culture, providing the target readers the highest contextual effect with the lowest processing efforts.

Civil sacred: The nobel and the laureate position in cultural space

This essay situates the Nobel's institutional charisma within the “laureate position,” an older but still relevant socio-institutional formation that frames literature as a “higher good” (as distinct, say, from “mere” entertainment). The first three sections place the Nobel within the landscape of literary prizes, discussing its particular currency of value (strong rather than weak), its relation to different frames of value (consumerist, democratic, charismatic) and sites of consecration (the literary field vs. the civil-sphere). The next three sections sketch the Nobel's historical background – the laureate position – from the early modern period through the present, looking at how differing regimes (vocation, trade, singularity, communality) can form a “good match” depending on time and place. The final two sections explore how the Nobel deals with the prize system's internal tensions between “respect” and “esteem” (when identitarian expressivism clashes with notions of craft or intellectual mastery), as well as with tensions between competing agents of consecration (exploring how Handke's Nobel crystallizes a conflict between the more scholastic curation cultures of the laureate position and the media and problem brokers of the civil sphere).

The broken coloniser

ABSTRACT Dutch colonial understanding of the Dutch East Indies has rarely taken into consideration the experiences and influences of returnees and of colonialists originating outside the Netherlands’ political centre. In this article we make a case of how Frisian novels from the colonial period might provide a solution to this paucity of original data, as they have rarely been analysed in relation to colonialism. We take, as a case study, the work of the Frisian author Nyckle Haisma (1907–1943), who lived in the Dutch East Indies between 1930–1935 and 1936–1943 and wrote Peke Donia, de koloniaal based upon his unsuccessful, temporary return to Friesland in 1935. Haisma’s novel depicts the former colony as a catalyst that breaks the ability of the main protagonist to reintegrate into his home province. In addition, it constructs a paradox between the provinces of Holland and Friesland and deploys the author’s inability to integrate into Friesland as a result of his imaginary Dutch East Indies that he has created in opposition to his own homeland. Following the award of the highest literary prize of Frisian literature – the Gysbert Japicxpriis – in 1948, Haisma’s writings became embedded into the Frisian literary landscape, yet the colonial discourse apparent in the work was left unquestioned. We argue that the effects of colonialism, as portrayed in Peke Donia, must be considered when studying the Netherlands’ colonial legacies and their interplay with Dutch society in contemporary times.

Diffuse consecration: How modes of authorship shape literary prizes

This article takes a fresh look at Pierre Bourdieu's notion of consecration by applying a mixed methods approach to the way authorship unfolds around the Nobel Prize. Drawing on both conceptual literary history and corpus-assisted discourse analysis, the case study of Herta Müller's ‘unexpected’ win in 2009 is taken as a starting point for establishing how different ‘modes of authorship’ play out in different contexts and at different scales. Conceptually speaking, ‘modes of authorship’ develop further Jérôme Meizoz's work on ‘literary posture’ (2007, 2011), expressing how multiple actors, human and non-human alike, convey attitude within the networks that cohere around literature. Newspaper coverage of Müller's win at different points in time and place, together with paratextual material (book covers, front/end matter) that pre- and post-dates the Nobel award, is analysed to identify modes of authorship associated with Nobel winners. Our analysis documents how the scandals that periodically ensue when an ‘unlikely’ author wins point to a much more diffuse notion of consecration than traditional field theory allows. This is better captured through a network-inspired ontology of authorship than through the inferential approaches more standardly offered by literary theory.

The Symbolic Economy of the Nobel Prize in literature: how it counters or reproduces modes of domination

According to Bourdieu's theory, literary prizes are those specific authorities which contribute in the long run to the conversion of symbolic capital into economic capital. The Nobel Prize played a major role in the unification of a relatively autonomous international literary space, as described by Casanova. It helped create a new canon of world literature, as the Nobel prize winners were widely translated. But whereas Casanova places the emphasis on autonomy, this paper underscores the relative heteronomy that this award conveys. Literary authorities negotiate between autonomous and heteronomous criteria, be they ideological or economic. This paper examines how the symbolic capital of the Nobel Prize has served to reinforce modes of domination. The intersectional and Western domination which biased the selection of laureates slowly evolved into more diversity and inclusiveness. Concentrating on the three last decades, which correspond to the globalization era, we observe however that despite the growing inclusion of non-Western authors, it is the dominant Western cultural intermediaries (publishers and literary agents) who mostly capitalize the symbolic and economic profit of the prize. These observations are based on a quantitative analysis of the publishers of the 33 laureates since 1990 in three languages, English, German and French.

Is there a Nobel Prize effect? Translations after the Nobel Prize a quantitative analysis of translations of germanophone literature's Nobel laureates

The Nobel Prize is said to have many effects: increased public perception, or even political influence of the Nobel laureate and her related work on the one hand, inappropriate attributions of authoritative knowledge in areas unrelated to the laureate's expertise, distraction, and reduced productivity on the other. We want to find out the extent to which there is a Nobel effect on public perception and the development of a canon of world literature – in particular, by examining the translations of the works of the germanophone literature laureates before and after the award in a quantitative perspective.We argue that the global distribution of books is an indication for the awarding body, the Swedish Academy, that an author might be a worthy candidate and/or a result of the award. The latter aspect leads to the conclusion that the Nobel Prize in Literature could be regarded as a specific type of brand: a meta-brand that consecrates quality or even authority. This is particularly notable in the high numbers of translations published after the award. A comparison of translations of works written by Nobel Prize winners with translations by non-awarded authors, however, shows that the Nobel Prize is not a necessary condition for high numbers of translations and resulting acts of canonization of a work or an author. Consequently, the consecrating authority of the Swedish Academy may only be significant in certain cases.

How the Nobel became a world prize: Scalar mediation in the global literary field

This article introduces the concept of scalar mediation to describe a central aspect of the work of global consecrating organizations. Existing work has demonstrated how scales within global cultural fields can operate as distinctive symbolic universes. The present study looks at how global consecrators bridge the different and sometimes contradictory judgements made at different scales to produce selections that “scale up” and appear legitimate before global audiences. It examines the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature using a qualitative and quantitative analysis of archival records from 1901 to 1966 – some of the most recent years available under the statutes of the Nobel Foundation. The results show that the scales of mediation for the Nobel Prize underwent several transformations during the period of observation. The earliest prizes favored the tastes of conservative national academies over international literary opinion, while in the 1920s and 1930s the Nobel largely ignored or rejected the preferences of other cultural authorities. Only after 1946 did the prize recognize cosmopolitan literary pioneers and world-renowned thinkers with any regularity. The findings reveal that scalar mediation can be a slow, uncertain, and contested process, even in the most self-evidently global of cultural organizations.

Purifying the Narcissist hero; A Feminist study of Kawabata Yasunari’s Snow Country

This study examines the portrayal of women in Yasunari Kawabata's work Snow Country, specifically focusing on their depiction as individuals characterized by vulnerability, subordination, and objectification. Kawabata Yasunari was a renowned Japanese author who was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for elucidating the Japanese mentality in his writings.In 1938, he released his most celebrated novel, Yukiguni (The Snow Country). Set in a remote hot spring town in the mountainous foothills of northern Japan, Snow Country is a dismal tale of a love affair between a Tokyo socialite and a regional geisha. In the novel, Women are labelled as weaklings. They are the ones who constantly weep and are frequently abandoned, whereas men are the dominant and stronger species. The narrative depicts women solely as sexual objects for males.

Interconnections between Art and Commerce: Literary Prizes, Readers, and the Reading Committee of the Irish Women Writers' Club (1933–1958)

ABSTRACT This essay examines the interconnections between art and commerce that lie behind cultural production. Using the case study of the Irish Women Writers’ Club (1933–1958), it explores the political, cultural, and social realms in which alliances are formed and supported, and the intersections between culture and the business of books, art, and politics, reading committees and readers. It extends on recent scholarship which positions women writers firmly at the centre of Irish literary life in the mid-twentieth century, offering new unpublished accounts of the club, their public activities and reading practices, and the machinations behind the reading committee that awarded the literary prize, the Book of the Year, from the period 1936–1939. As progressives, they leveraged their connections, national and international, to maintain a space for female intellectual thought while keeping alive the tradition of women's writing for future generations.