Pub Date : 2023-11-21DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00804008
Carlos Spoerhase
To reconstruct the history of the Nobel Prize and its impact on the making of world literature is a task of staggering dimensions. Nevertheless, letters and archival documents offer a glimpse into its workings. This paper examines Hannah Arendt’s efforts to secure the Nobel Prize for Karl Jaspers, as a case study in the globalization of the literary field after the Second World War. It is shown how Arendt and her allies in the German and American publishing trade mobilized an international network of supporters in Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, France, Italy, Great Britain, Japan, and the United States in order to secure the “world prize” for the German “world thinker”. The paper also tries to explain why these intensive international efforts ultimately failed.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-21DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00804006
Anna Lanfranchi
This article re-evaluates the translation strategy of the Italian publisher Mondadori for Pearl S. Buck. From the first translations in the book series Medusa to the latest editions of the 2010s, the publisher’s literary assessment and marketing strategy for Buck’s oeuvre fluctuated towards and away the standing of a Nobel Prize laurate. By collecting and analysing a variety of records from the publisher’s archive at Fondazione Arnoldo and Alberto Mondadori (Milan, Italy) and the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (Marbach, Germany), this contribution challenges pre-existing narratives concerning this author’s Italian publication history. By identifying four phases in Mondadori’s programme for Pearl S. Buck, it argues that a rebranding that intentionally moved her public image away from the unwieldy shadow of the Nobel ultimately prolonged Buck’s success in the Italian language throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
本文重新评估了意大利蒙达多利出版社对珍珠-S-巴克的翻译策略。从 "美杜莎 "系列丛书的首批译本到 2010 年代的最新版本,该出版社对巴克作品的文学评价和营销策略在与诺贝尔文学奖得主的地位之间摇摆不定。通过收集和分析阿诺尔多和阿尔贝托-蒙达多利基金会(意大利米兰)和德意志文学档案馆(德国马尔巴赫)的出版商档案中的各种记录,这篇论文挑战了有关这位作家意大利出版史的既有叙事。通过确定 Mondadori 为 Pearl S. Buck 所做计划的四个阶段,文章认为,有意将其公众形象从诺贝尔奖的阴影中移除的品牌重塑最终延长了 Buck 在整个 20 世纪和 21 世纪意大利语的成功。
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Pub Date : 2023-11-21DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00804004
Tim Sommer
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.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-21DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00804002
James F. English
In the late 20th century, the Nobel Prize enjoyed an unrivaled position as the most powerful instrument of literary consecration. But recent shifts in the relationship between money and prestige, and in the forms of scandal that attend cultural awards, are weakening the Nobel’s symbolic hold. Symptomatic missteps by the Swedish Academy, occurring against a backdrop of increasingly extreme concentration of wealth, have opened a window of opportunity for the founding of a new super-prize better suited than the Nobel to dominate today’s economy of world-literary prestige.
{"title":"The Nobel and the Price of Prestige in the 21st Century","authors":"James F. English","doi":"10.1163/24056480-00804002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00804002","url":null,"abstract":"In the late 20th century, the Nobel Prize enjoyed an unrivaled position as the most powerful instrument of literary consecration. But recent shifts in the relationship between money and prestige, and in the forms of scandal that attend cultural awards, are weakening the Nobel’s symbolic hold. Symptomatic missteps by the Swedish Academy, occurring against a backdrop of increasingly extreme concentration of wealth, have opened a window of opportunity for the founding of a new super-prize better suited than the Nobel to dominate today’s economy of world-literary prestige.","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":"18 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139254417","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-21DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00804005
Katrin Hudey
In 1938, Pearl S. Buck was decorated with the highest literature award possible: the Nobel Prize. In most cases an award like this leads to a high increase in the symbolic capital for the author and raises the value of their books, but not for Pearl S. Buck. Looking closer at the global reception of Pearl S. Buck’s books before and after the awarding reveals that giving the Nobel Prize to her was for several reasons one of the most discussed decisions by the Swedish Committee. In the following, I will look exemplarily at the constellation of USA, China, and Nazi-Germany to reconstruct how her books were received in different national contexts before and after 1938 to investigate the global and national effects of her awarding.
{"title":"Pearl S. Buck, Her Nobel Prize, and the Nazis","authors":"Katrin Hudey","doi":"10.1163/24056480-00804005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00804005","url":null,"abstract":"In 1938, Pearl S. Buck was decorated with the highest literature award possible: the Nobel Prize. In most cases an award like this leads to a high increase in the symbolic capital for the author and raises the value of their books, but not for Pearl S. Buck. Looking closer at the global reception of Pearl S. Buck’s books before and after the awarding reveals that giving the Nobel Prize to her was for several reasons one of the most discussed decisions by the Swedish Committee. In the following, I will look exemplarily at the constellation of USA, China, and Nazi-Germany to reconstruct how her books were received in different national contexts before and after 1938 to investigate the global and national effects of her awarding.","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":"442 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139250881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-21DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00804003
Peter B. Vermeulen
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.
{"title":"The Indie Nobel?","authors":"Peter B. Vermeulen","doi":"10.1163/24056480-00804003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00804003","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":"45 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139253450","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-21DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00804007
Michael Ka Chi Cheuk
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.
{"title":"The Nobel Literature Prize and Peacebuilding","authors":"Michael Ka Chi Cheuk","doi":"10.1163/24056480-00804007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-00804007","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139253870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-16DOI: 10.1163/24056480-00803001
Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan, José R. Ibáñez
This article examines the presence of Poe’s fiction in Spain, focusing on the reception of his anthologized short stories in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, and taking this as a case of literary hospitality that helped to develop the fantasy genre in the country. In the early decades of publication, collections of Poe’s short stories were generally introduced into Spain as translations of anthologies of Baudelaire’s French versions. These anthologies appealed to a broad readership and sold well, being published by both large, professional houses and smaller, family-run presses. Poe came to form part of the literary canon that was being shaped in the final decades of the nineteenth century in Spain, and was thus published alongside major literary figures, which attests to the kind of literary hospitality he enjoyed in Spain’s cultural world in the decades following his introduction into the country.
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Pub Date : 2023-08-16DOI: 10.1163/24056480-tat00005
Lara Norgaard
Crime fiction, a frequently translated and highly translatable literary genre, has generated perspectives on the global and the local in ways that shape cartographies of world literature. The Indonesian novel 24 Hours with Gaspar by Sabda Armandio is a case study for how specific texts within the genre can serve as points of departure for theorizing cultural geography in an imaginative mode. Analyzing Gaspar through three spatial optics, this paper considers the novel’s global influences, the elements that fall into relief as local in translation, and – by attending to patterns of movement and contact that complicate place-based perspectives – the archipelagic qualities of the text. By imagining this alternative conception of literary space, Armandio’s novel recasts the contemporary global novel as the product of contact, mobility, and linguistic and material flows rather than sites of static national or regional identity.
{"title":"Archipelagic Currents in the Global Novel","authors":"Lara Norgaard","doi":"10.1163/24056480-tat00005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/24056480-tat00005","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Crime fiction, a frequently translated and highly translatable literary genre, has generated perspectives on the global and the local in ways that shape cartographies of world literature. The Indonesian novel 24 Hours with Gaspar by Sabda Armandio is a case study for how specific texts within the genre can serve as points of departure for theorizing cultural geography in an imaginative mode. Analyzing Gaspar through three spatial optics, this paper considers the novel’s global influences, the elements that fall into relief as local in translation, and – by attending to patterns of movement and contact that complicate place-based perspectives – the archipelagic qualities of the text. By imagining this alternative conception of literary space, Armandio’s novel recasts the contemporary global novel as the product of contact, mobility, and linguistic and material flows rather than sites of static national or regional identity.","PeriodicalId":36587,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World Literature","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47503146","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-16DOI: 10.1163/24056480-tat00006
Imogen Nutting
This study follows the origins of and search for “Clock Man”, from a nineteenth century Yorkshire folktale to a 2012 forum post about a lost 1976 Czechoslovakian stop motion film, and evaluates its merits as a piece of contemporary world literature. The internet has significantly altered how people communicate and share stories, allowing a range of texts to be instantly created, disseminated and discussed around the world. As the classification and study of ‘world literature’ are affected by changing standards of communication and literary merit, these new media communications can provide contemporary insight into how literature may be found in virtual public spaces. This paper blends theories of literariness, reception and new media with Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of deterritorialization to track the changes in the “Clock Man” story and observe broader trends of contemporary world literature in digital storytelling spaces.
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