The Social Life of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Highlights the unexpected influences and functions of the Nobel Prize in Literature across the world, offering innovative insights about the nature of the Prize and the possibilities for its next phase of reform.

In 2018, the Nobel Prize in Literature was postponed for the first time in 70 years, as the Swedish Academy was engulfed in a series of scandals. While the Prize’s credibility in passing judgment on world literature has always been called into question, as an alleged site of injustice and abuse of power, the world asked, Do readers still need the Prize? The scandals tainted the Swedish Academy’s reputation, and more importantly, damaged the relationship between society and the Prize. But what are the terms and conditions of that relationship? And what type of reforms can repair it?

The Social Life of the Nobel Prize in Literature tackles these questions by first moving beyond the assumption that the Prize is only useful as an arbiter of global literary excellence. Indeed, if the Prize represents the most prestigious form of cultural recognition, its functions could be anything and everything. As such, the Prize’s utility most certainly is not limited to literary adjudication and canonization. The chapters present case studies examining the Prize as a cultural object that gains meaning through the way it moves across institutions, news reports, political speeches, and popular imagination. Taken together, the book argues that the Nobel Prize in Literature’s impact arises from the relations between different users of its prestige, where the Prize takes on a “social life” of its own.