Rebecca Braun

Fetishising intellectual achievement: the Nobel Prize and European literary celebrity

This paper investigates the concept of literary celebrity within a specifically European context. Following the work of Pascale Casanova and Pierre Bourdieu, it suggests that the Nobel Prize is a specifically European consecrating institution within ‘international literary space’, and that it is both a product of and major contributor to a mid-European, non-market-driven model for valuing high-end cultural achievement. Whilst sharing some of the outer trappings of broader, Anglo-American determined conceptions of celebrity in terms of, for example, the media attention bestowed upon famous authors, this model, with its emphasis on intellectual and moral instruction, functions in a fundamentally different way to transatlantic market-driven models of fame. After exploring the development of the prize in line with the emergence of both wider modern-day celebrity and underlying processes of intellectual fetishisation inherent in the French-defined field of restricted cultural production, I consider how individual authors, of both European and non-European nationality, respond to this culturally contingent model of literary celebrity. My analysis focuses both on their formulation of a response at the point of consecration and what their response tells us more generally about the social and cultural value of authorship in a European setting.

The world author in us all: conceptualising fame and agency in the global literary market

ABSTRACT This article explores the link between national success as a writer and the promotional structures of world literature in the West. It does so through critically examining how individual people relate to the various creative processes that underpin literature as it travels around the western world. The article draws in particular on Bruno Latour’s work on the concepts of ‘agency’ and ‘mediators’ in the context of actor–network theory, as well as developing the idea of a ‘network intellectual’ put forward in 2015 by Fred Turner and Christine Larson. In so doing, the article finds common ground between literary studies and celebrity studies that can help parse the concept of ‘literary celebrity’. The model for understanding the links between authorship, celebrity and world literature that I propose is exemplified through reference to the intertwined contemporary careers of novelists Daniel Kehlmann and Jonathan Franzen. Both writers have achieved bestseller status in their respective national contexts (Germany/Austria and the United States), both deliberately seek to place their work and person into dialogue with key writers and works from other national traditions, and both have been systematically promoted across multiple countries as international success stories. Approaching them as contemporary case studies in both world authorship and literary celebrity allows us to reconsider how individuals carry wider cultural value in an age of rapid network expansion.

PRIZE GERMANS? CHANGING NOTIONS OF GERMANNESS AND THE ROLE OF THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Abstract Germany has an unusually large number of literary prize foundations in international comparison. The historical and socio-political reasons for such a widespread ritual appropriation of ‘award-winning’ authors can tell us a great deal about changing notions of German cultural identity. This paper argues that whereas the long-running named literary prizes (such as the Büchner and Kleist prizes) place their laureates in a retrospective tradition that is firmly tied to national and regional cultural politics, a new breed of prizes — spearheaded by the German Book Prize — has emerged since the beginning of the twenty-first century that deliberately seeks to propel authors beyond the confines of the German literary field. These prizes proactively ‘celebrify’ the author with the explicit intention of bringing to market a self-consciously contemporary, more diverse image of Germanness. Pursuing a literary career in such a context is both a challenge and an opportunity, as the specific case of Daniel Kehlmann shows.

Introduction: Re-viewing literary celebrity

What is literary celebrity, and why should people working in other areas of either literary or celebrity studies care about it? Our answer is threefold. First, as a socially urgent topic (how authors are recognised and valued in the western world), it is something of a lifeline to literary studies, which, towards the end of the twentieth century, came dangerously close to running aground on self-regarding analyses of self-regarding texts (Jameson 1991, Eagleton 2003, English 2010, Felski 2015). Alongside postcolonial and feminist studies, as well as recent trends in queer theory and ecocriticism, literary celebrity has offered a bridge to those scholars who want to think literature back into the bigger picture of society. Seminal works by, for example, Moran (2000), Glass (2004) and Jaffe (2005) set it out as a particular, historical response to the emergence of mass culture in the early to mid-twentieth century. Subsequent studies have argued with various different aspects of this premise: whether this is to contest the moment and material mode of literary celebrity’s genesis (Mole 2007, 2009) or the unacknowledged gender bias underpinning the very concepts of ‘fame’ and ‘celebrity’ (Hammill 2007, Weber 2012). Surveying the by now substantial body of research on literary celebrity in 2014, Ohlsson et al. (2014) argued for yet greater diversification of the field of study: to include all forms of fiction, and to differentiate between literary contexts across time and in various geopolitical spaces. This necessarily brief overview of the field brings us to the second point about literary celebrity’s significance: it is increasingly obvious that literary celebrity constitutes less a specific phenomenon within the history of literature than a necessarily multipronged methodological approach to the study of literature. Thinking about issues of reputation and writers’ relations with readers focuses the critical theorist on the innate constituents of literature: authors, readers, texts, ideas of affect, representation and self-fashioning. But it does so in such a way that also permits the study of literature to go beyond itself and to ask how ideas of literary value intersect with other predominant notions of social and economic value at any one time or place; to consider the material and pecuniary aspects of the book trade alongside the aesthetic techniques evolved in anticipation of a work’s wider appropriation; and to take seriously the demonstrable relationship between the author’s literary work and the marginalia of everyday life (as Foucault [2000, p. 207], in the case of Nietzsche’s laundry lists, implicitly does not). Looking at the ways in which authors’ lives jostle with their works, and how both their lives and works become inserted into other, non-literary discourses, requires a multi-faceted, multi-