Winning Fictions

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

To our knowledge, Homer never won any literary prizes; neither did Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dickens, the Brontes, Nella Larson, Agatha Christie, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald or thousands of other important writers, most of whom wrote before the rise of the age of literary prizes. And, yet, somehow these writers and their works have persisted. What does it mean to anoint one work of fiction as "the best" of its year? How is such a judgment determined? What effect, if any, does such a distinction have on the sales of the honored work? Do such prizes ever have a detrimental effect on their recipients and how do they affect (or not) the lasting life of a book? This course explores how we assign literary value to works of fiction through both the gradual process of canon formation and through the swifter (and, frequently, incompatible) process of reviews, "best of the year lists," and, above all, literary awards. The particular prism for our investigations will be the Man Booker Prize-- a literary prize awarded each year for the best original novel written in the English language and published in the UK. Taking the controversial year 2005 as a focal point, students will read the 5 novels nominated that year (which culminated in John Banville's The Sea being chosen as the winner that seemed to please almost no one, with the certain exception of Mr. Banville). To follow the prize process in "real time," Students will also choose one book from the 2018 Man Booker Prize "long list" (announced in August) and, finally the 2018 Man Booker Prize winner (announced at the end of October). We will also explore questions and controversies in the awarding of other prizes-such as The Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 2012 for which this professor served as a juror, and the 1988 and 1998 National Book Awards in Fiction. Simultaneously we will read and discuss critical works on value and evaluation. Among them: Matthew Arnold's "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," Dwight Macdonald's Midcult and Masscult, Zadie Smith's "Some Notes on Attunement" and "The I Who Is Not Me," "Barbara Herrnstein Smith's "Contingencies of Value" and John Guillory's Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation.