2005 Nobel Literature Prize

[nicky g]

"Quite a few, actually. I did an undergraduate minor in comparative literature at Cornell, and wrote my honors thesis in that subject on Gunter Grass's _Danzig Trilogy_, so I'm rather well-versed in German-language literature. There aren't a great number of well-known Austrian fiction writers (the Austrian-born American Vicki Baum, the playwright Arthur Schnitzler, and Austrian Jewish dissident writer Stefan Zweig are the three that come right to mind) but quite a few in other fields, like Sigmund and Anna Freud, Alfred Adler and Viktor Frankl in psychology, just for starters. My point was that I had never even -heard- of Elfriede Jelinek before she won the 2004 Nobel, and you're talking to a guy who spends 1/3 of his waking life with his family, 1/3 playing poker, and the other 1/3 working and living in and around the literary world. It's no big deal if the -average American-, or even the average 2+2er, hadn't heard of Jelinek. But if a person who manages a Barnes and Noble for a living and studied comparative literature in college HAD NEVER EVEN HEARD HER NAME before she won the Nobel, maybe that signifies that the Swedish Academy is going a little obscure and political with their selections."

No offence but your citations of German language literature are a bit out of date in terms of relevance to the most recent Nobel Prize, given that most of them are dead. I apologise for assuming that you paid little attention to foreign language or German language Literature, but I don't see that a former CompLit student who works in a bookshop is necessarily qualified to deny someone's qualification for the Nobel Prize on the basis of whether or not he's heard of them. If you pay a great deal of attention to contemporary foreign writing, then maybe, but... I don't think managing a booskshop means you'll automatically have heard of all the best writers worldwide, especially given that the commercial success/popularity required to receive translation is hardly equal to literary merit.

"That's because the best candidates this year all happen to be English-language authors."

This is seriously ridiculous.

"Anyone who thinks that Stephen King is a writer of "trash" stopped reading his work after _It_, or just hasn't been playing close attention. I think King is similar to Herman Melville in that, while he's certainly a popular writer while he's alive, he will really begin to be taken -seriously- as the all-time great writer he is only after his death."


So is this. It's a very difficult thing to argue. but I don't understand how you could think there's as much thought or intelligence in King's entire opus as a single Melville short story.