Book Awards and the Literary Marketplace

File under: Must read someday. Sociological approaches to literature and art tend to be of fairly limited interest to me. I already know that in the global marketplace works of art and literature are regarded as one more commodity to be bought and sold and that in their pursuit of cultural capital artists and writers can be as competitive as CEOs are of economic capital. Nonetheless, James English's analysis of the function of literary prizes in The Economy of Prestige sounds intriguing.

His basic premise is that controversies and scandals about who and what works deserve or don't deserve awards are precisely why the prize system exists in the first place. The contempt for the prizes that various scandals provoke (e.g. When Toni Morrison's Beloved failed to win the National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1987 forty-eight of her friends and supporters published a statement of protest in the Times Book Review. She won the Pulitzer a few months later and the Nobel five years after that) enables us - the reading public - to sustain a belief in artistic meritocracy and the autonomy of aesthetic judgment. Louis Menand summarizes English's core claim:

His theory is that when people make these objections to the nature of prizes they are helping to sustain a collective belief that true art has nothing to do with things like politics, money, in-group tastes, and beating out the other guy. As long as we want to believe that creative achievement is special, that a work of art is not just one more commodity seeking to aggrandize itself in the marketplace at the expense of other works of art, we need prizes so that we can complain about how stupid they are. In this respect, it is at least as important that the prize go to the wrong person as that it go to the right one. No one thinks that Tolstoy was less than a great writer because he failed to win the Nobel. The failure to win the Nobel has become, in the end, a mark of his greatness.

The same could be said of a number of other major writers whom the Nobel snubbed. James Joyce immediately comes to mind, and I suspect Thomas Pynchon, no stranger to prize controversies, may follow in Joyce's wake. I'm curious to see what English has to say about Pynchon. My sense has always been that Pynchon understands the literary market as well as anyone and that his decision to assume the role of ultra-reclusive novelist with an irreverence for awards (sending the comedian Irwin Corey to accept the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow) was a shrewd move. Pynchon doesn't have to do the circuit of readings and public appearances (TV hardly appears to be an option anymore, unless Oprah Winfrey picks up your book) yet remains in the public eye (at least in the Internet, where his name turns up regularly - though not as often as Don DeLillo - in my Google updates).

OK Computer: Photo of the Day #5

(Yawn) Another day almost terminated. Too much (or never enough?) time spent contemplating text before an electronic terminal...

'Mats Live! Sept 5, 1981

In the course of reading various blogs written by other disgruntled young academics pursuing degrees in the humanities, I just stumbled across this video footage from September 5, 1981 of The Replacements playing at the 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis. Fantastic!

I saw the 'Mats live only once, on what turned out to be their final tour, so it's great to actually see Bob playing live. Tommy Stinson must be about 14 here.

If you go up a level in the TwinTone URL, you'll find other goodies - video of other indie bands who recorded with TwinTone including some of my long-time favorites: The Jayhawks, Soul Asylum, and The Mekons.

File Under Posthistoricism

The conventional wisdom is that a Democratic Party in which Moulitsas calls the shots would cater to every whim of its liberal base. But though he can match Michael Moore for shrillness, the most salient thing about Moulitsas's politics is not where he falls on the left-right spectrum (he's actually not very far left). It's his relentless competitiveness, founded not on any particular set of political principles, but on an obsession with tactics - and in particular, with the tactics of a besieged minority, struggling for survival: stand up for your principles, stay united, and never back down from a fight. "They want to make me into the latest Jesse Jackson, but I'm not ideological at all," Moulitsas told me, "I'm just all about winning."

This quote comes from a profile of Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, described as "the world's biggest political blogger." I found the piece frustrating. While I'm all for Democrats toughening up 'their game,' i.e., developing plans to thwart the Republican's Rove-style tactics, I am dubious about an ostensible political leader who claims to be beyond ideology - if that is supposed to mean an abandonment of political principles.

On the one hand, it's a mistake to frame political debates exclusively in terms of overly abstract - what a Hegelian would dub "empty" - principles such as "freedom" or whatever. On the other hand, I don't want a political party (Democrats or otherwise) where winning elections is all that matters. I want to see a truly progressive political party in the United States - one that is concerned about real-world results - reducing material inequalities and improving living conditions for all Americans, not just the those in the top 20% or whatever of the income bracket.

Tenure Reform: Will it Happen?

I've been following reports about reforming tenure within language departments. At present, a published monograph, i.e. a book, is pretty much standard at most research universities. The problems facing assistant professors are many, but one of the most fundamental in this case is economic. University presses, under pressure to make a profit, simply cannot afford to publish every scholarly monograph that comes along. These titles have a relatively small readership, for many fields about 1,000 people. To make matters worse, academic libraries at financially strapped state institutions have had their acquisitions budgets slashed in recent years. Consequently, university presses have been publishing fewer titles.

One possible solution, which I would like to see, is that electronic publications and journal articles will count for more in the tenure-revue process. My sense is that many first books are derived from journal articles anyway, so why not simply count those as one's contribution to the field? It's always struck me as a bit perverse to expect scholars at the beginning of their careers, who are learning the professional ropes and often get saddled with a disproportionate amount of bureaucratic work, to publish brilliant books right after graduate school. Give the professors time and the resources to develop their ideas in and out of the classroom. Let them publish articles and develop their ideas and methodologies more gradually, taking into account the responses and feedback they obtain through the journal-publishing process.

In any case, I'm glad to learn that the Modern Language Association (MLA) has been drafting a new proposal calling for a more transparent tenure-review process, one that provides multiple career options for obtaining tenure. I hope this tenure business gets straightened out soon. One of my worries is that Ira and I will be entering the market before new plans are in place and, to put it bluntly, will get screwed. I've heard the horror stories, which lead me to conclude that the more transparent the criteria for tenure are, the better.

My hunch is that the monograph will continue to be regarded as the most reliable measure of one's academic merit, and as the number of new titles published shrink, books will only continue to grow in prestige. Whether the aura surrounding the published book constitutes a version of fetishism is a topic I'll let others debate. Read more on the tenure-reform issue at Inside Higher Ed:A Tenure Reform Plan With Legs. The page includes linnks to related articles published previously.