Assessment 2: 1500 words
Analyse the “Scratch” interview and discuss the main findings you discovered in your comprehension of how the literary field that has been discussed, works. You need to refer to the ideas and concepts we have discussed in the course from week 1 to week 5. So if you choose the interview of the writer, you need to analyse what you learn about the functioning of the literary field from that interview, not discuss the creative writing process (refer to the set of questions for our guest speaker Roanna Gonsalves we will work on in week 3). You need to discuss how they provide insight into the ideas we are discussing in the course.
You will also need to write a set of five to seven interview questions that you would ask to the interviewee to know more about the field.
> So your essay has 2 parts (totalling 1500 words): essay on what you learnt from the field in the interview you have chosen + questions you would ask to the interviewee to learn more about the field.
The way you divide the 1500 words is up to you, but I suggest you keep the bulk of your word count for the analysis. The analysis and the questions can be integrated one to another, or separate. The questions can be added at the end of your piece, as a separate section.
While I do not insist on one particular referencing style, you have to use the same one consistently throughout your essay. I suggest one you have used previously in other courses, trusted in literary studies, like MLA or Chicago. Below you will find a rubric I will use for marking.
Assessment Criteria:
Identify and effectively apply concepts and ideas from week 1 to week 5 related to the interviewee’s specific field
Demonstrate your understanding of the functioning of the field in the analysis of the interview and in the design of questions
Research and engage critically with the interviewee’s field
Present the script in a grammatically and typographically correct form with coherent and accurate referencing
Concepts covered from Weeks 1 – 5
Introduction to the course: the literary field and literary prizes The Nobel lecture by Bob Dylan and James English on literary prizes.
Margaret Atwood Literary Authorship and Celebrity Culture
The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century.
The adaptation industry
Literature in the digital age
Lecture Notes for Each Week:
WEEK 1: Introduction to the course: the literary field and literary prizes The Nobel lecture by Bob Dylan and James English on literary prizes.
Materialist theories versus new criticism, structuralism
Materialist theories : Cultural studies: Raymond Williams
Louis Althusser
Pierre Bourdieu
Autonomous/heteronomous
Bourdieu: literature cannot be reduced to its political, economic or social factors; it has its own laws
Not only material production, it’s also about the symbolic production of a work of art, how value is constructed
Pierre Bourdieu The Rules of Art (1992) : it’s the development of a literary market on a large scale that made possible the professionalization of the field and at the same time the development of the ideology of artistic purity, detached from economic problems.
Sarah Brouillette: “it is here in the sphere of property ownership and legal stature that the emergence of romanticism’s originating genius-author is often located.”
The different fields are subject to pressures, the relations between the fields are dynamic.
3 forms of capital: Cultural (or symbolic capital); Economic capital; Political capital
This week, our main concern is on the links between literature and power, through what Bourdieu defines as cultural and political capitals
Importance of agency in Bourdieu: balance between structure and agency
One of the most important forms of cultural capital we can find in literature : literary prizes
Literary prizes are about popularity, readability, literariness.
Literary prizes increase authors’ cultural capital (prestige) as well as economic capital (increase in sales).
James English’s article:
proliferation of awards at the beginning of the 20th c.
The Nobel Prize for literature was founded in 1901 and started the trend.
James English’s argument is that things are complex today: whereas the cultural field and the economic fields were working one against the other previously from the end of the 19th c, there is more intertwining today
In the first mini-lecture we saw that at the end of the 19th c, the economic field and cultural fields were becoming separated, what is happening sometimes around the 1970s, it that they become more intertwined again.
Art (and literature in it) is like a game, there’s a set of rules, and players navigate around these rules.
James English: scandals are an intrinsic part of the functioning of literary prizes.
Booker Prize in the UK established in the 1960s
scandals speed up the accumulation of prestige
Points out the illusion of pure art, the idea that art and literature could be totally abstracted from their political and economical contexts and that the artist would not be concerned about anything else than writing masterpieces
what journalists are doing when they say prizes are too much about networking and power and money and not enough about literature, it’s that they reinforce this illusion that literature can be entirely autonomous
Bob Dylan: Nobel prize awarded him the prize “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
The New York Times “Mr. Dylan, 75, is the first musician to win the award, and his selection on Thursday is perhaps the most radical choice in a history stretching back to 1901.”
“In choosing a popular musician for the literary world’s highest honor, the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize, dramatically redefined the boundaries of literature, setting off a debate about whether song lyrics have the same artistic value as poetry or novels.”
Salman Rushdie tweeted: “From Orpheus to Faiz ,(poet in Urdu) song & poetry have been closely linked. Dylan is the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition. Great choice.”
Nobel Prize winners usually come to Stockholm to receive their prize and give a lecture.
Dylan did not travel to Stockholm to receive the prize and was a bit cavalier about the whole thing, sending them his speech very late so this added to the scandal of his choice.
The Pulitzer Prize for “his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.”
His speech is about the connection in his songs between music and literature. He insists on the fact that his songs are infused with literary images and references. He also mixes two things in his songs: canonical literature and folk culture.
Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey.
Is the Nobel prize a further global recognition for writers already recognised in their national context?
Graham Huggan The Postcolonial Exotic (2001): The Nobel now often corrects the domestic market.
Example of the French Jean-Marie Le Clézio
The Nobel prize is read in national terms not as World Literature. Wole Soyinka saw it as a prize for Nigeria, not to him as a Black writer.
The Nobel recognizes precisely the authors who work on universality.
The particular flavour of these universal text: One, it often means works that take a political stance, recognizing the work of writers as activists / Two, often the works will be indigenous texts, belonging to a subnational literature, for example from Maori literature, not New Zealand literature.
Maori literature: Keri Hulme The Bone People (1984).
Major evolution in the politics of literary prizes since the beginning of the 20th century
WEEK 2: Margaret Atwood Literary Authorship and Celebrity Culture
The links between the three forms of capital through the figure of the author.
Celebrity as a phenomenon is linked to the rise of mass culture and especially to the movies at the beginning of 20th century.
Bourdieu’s ideas on consecration
Writers become ‘agents of legitimation’
Documentary “Margaret Atwood: A Word is Power” 2019
The Handmaid’s Tale
A writer both recognised as a canonical writer and a popular writer, both a figure of intellectual and a highly approachable writer
The celebrity author has many people working for her : labour
John Frow and James English, “Literary Authorship and Celebrity Culture.” A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction. Ed. English, James F. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 39-57.
Celebrity novelists are not simply successful novelists, they have a public persona.
Literary practices haven’t changed much, what has changed is the brand management and the massification of capital.
Myth of the artist as pure genius. The author is playing with the rules of the game. The case of Atwood is an excellent example of this strategizing.
Myth on the idea of celebrity as coming from the US and Hollywood.
Writers and fans contribute to celebrity processes
Celebrity relies on tensions, there’s no consensus.
Tensions happen not only between the economic and cultural capitals, but for example the Rushdie affair adds the religious element.
Salman Rushdie Satanic Verses (1989). The life of the prophet Muhammad, which led to an outrage in the Muslim world. That year, the Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, an order to kill Rushdie.
What was important in the affair was: who has power and legitimacy to talk about politics? Rushdie had wanted to be a spokesperson for Black Britain. The religious leaders say he’s not a spokesperson for the community.
Scandals today are linked to the author not so much to the text. In the 19th century, there were more about a specific text: the literary trials of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the scandal of Flaubert’s Mme Bovary: it was about the text, not about the authors’ morality.
British magazine GrantaShift from the signature of the author to the brand name.
Mark Twain
Literary celebrity is always linked not only to media but also to the personal presence, c.f. Atwood.
WEEK 3: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century.
The publisher: a critical literary practitioner
Books cannot be dissociated from the context of their production
Publisher’s tasks: Acquisition and development of catalogue; quality control of content; proofreading; design of the book and production; sales, marketing and distributing.
John Feather’s Agents, publishers and booksellers. In A Companion to Creative Writing, Edited by Graeme Harper. 2013 John Wiley & Son
At the end of the 16th c printing and bookselling started to become distinct
The development of copyright laws was critical, as it gave authors rights for a longer period of time.
The development of skills and experiences, like typesetting
The development of new technologies
These developments led to a big evolution in the 19th c. Publishing as we know it begins then
Introduction from John B. Thompson. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Polity, 2012.
An analysis of contemporary trade publishing, both fiction and non-fiction, in the US and the UK, on the basis of interviews with the people of the world of publishing
Story of a scout
Who are the players, what are their resources, what are the pressures?
Markets are an important part of fields, but fields are more than markets. There are also agents, what Bourdieu calls literary practitioners (people) and organisations, practices.
Notion of field is useful for 4 reasons: it allows us to think about a plurality of fields; to think in terms of relations; it shows that the power of agents and organisations is linked to the capital they possess; each field has its own dynamics
5 forms of capital: economic; symbolic; social capital; human capital; intellectual capital
Economic capital and cultural capital don’t go hand in hand at all times.
“The logic of the field”.
Why is it that publishers are still useful in a world where anyone can post a text on the internet?
The growth of the retail chain and the transformation of the retailing of books; importance of literary agents as a power broker; emergence of transnational publishing corporations from the 1960s with mergers and acquisitions
Growth of the retail chains
Rise of literary agents
Publishing corporations
Myth 1: corporations have no interest in publishing quality books
Myth 2: The owners of large corporations have a huge influence on the editorial content of the publishing house.
Myth 3 The corporations don’t publish new authors
Myth 4: Editors have lost their power in large corporations.
Myth 5: Editors no longer edit.
Polarization: There are a small number of very large corporations and a large number of very small publishers, but not many in between.
In 2006, ebooks were 0.1% of the sales. There was a steep rise throughout the 2010s and in 2011 it was 20% of the sales.
Reading ebooks leads to the creation of data
The consequences of the logic of publishing and the signs of the industry’s crisis: an ever-shrinking window of visibility for new books; an ever-stronger emphasis on frontlist over backlist; diminishing diversity in the marketplace of books sold to readers in spite of quantity.
WEEK 4: The Adaptation Industry
Adaptations sell and work very well in cinema. They’re also emblematic of larger social and economic ways of functioning in the cultural industry
Interdependency between different media
Cultural capital and prestige: cultural legitimacy
Simone Murray “The Business of Adaptation. Reading the Market.” In A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation. Edited by Deborah Cartmell. 2012 Blackwell Publishing
In the global entertainment industry, cultural products are fluid, they are repurposed
Murray: “cultural value is not innate in any work, but is socially constructed, perpetuated, or challenged. This realization makes possible an analysis of how each element in the adaptation network inflates or decreases a cultural text’s stocks of critical esteem.”
The “subsidiary rights” clauses in book contracts
Adaptation theories
More than half of all commercial movies derive from novels. Andrew Dudley. 1984. Concepts in film theory, Oxford, Oxford University Press
Hollywood cinema and its adaptations of Great books and classics: Quo Vadis; The Great Gatsby
Many adaptations come from books that have been recently awarded literary prizes.
The Patience Stone was awarded the Goncourt prize > the film adaptation re-canonizes
George Bluestone’s 1957. Novels into Film. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press.
Fidelity isn’t an adequate concept to think about adaptation.
Think about the relation between film adaptation and book like the relation between parent and child: a certain similarity but also a degree of rebellion.
Film adaptation as reading, rewriting, translation and interpretation
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