Swedish Academy Won’t Award Nobel Prize in Literature This Year
wsj.com
wsj.com
I’ve been hoping for Cormac McCarthy to win the Nobel Prize in literature for a number of years. I still think he deserves it, but I’m starting to lose hope.
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2005/08/cormac-mccarthy-i...
his book "The Double" is brilliant.
Non Paywall Coverage
BBC : http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43999240
Guardian : https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/04/nobel-prize-fo...
CNN: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/05/04/europe/nobel-prize-for-li...
The committee for the literature prize has contained some prestigious literary figures themselves, so it is to a slight degree a judgement of peers. Secondly, the membership of the committee has historically represented a high society that many authors have been members of themselves, or who hoped to have that high society among their audience. Go through the Nobel ceremony archives and you can see some writers getting quite emotional that they are there among the committee and the invited guests.
This book has an interesting but slightly reductive take on how prestige works in the arts: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/artworld-prestige-97...
Why else would the premier restaurant review have been started by a tire company? It's all path dependence, and once you get enough momentum behind one choice it becomes self reinforcing.
Yes, I am trying to.
Because a rich Swede endowed it over a century ago, and its had that time to build up prestige.
It's sort of like why Harvard is so prestigious: it was the first American University, its existed continuously, and has always ran itself like it was elite.
> I think it is a bit strange how we fetisihize the Nobel above all others.
My guess it's one of the oldest extant awards of its kind, if not the oldest.
This scandal (and the hiatus) might allow a competitor to emerge as the most prestigious award in the field of literature, but I doubt such award will have the same popular awareness, because the Nobel's breadth helps a lot with it's fame.
These awards systems with arbitrary judges are far from fair.
With regard to Borges, he shares the same problem in terms of female characters as Cormac McCarthy as mentioned above. Plus, there is a real lack of emotional depth to Borges’ work. His themes may interest anoraks like ourselves, but I don’t think he is a truly universal figure.
A literature prize like the Nobel is by definition a thing targeted towards literature buffs, and Borges is a god among gods for those kind of people (of which I'm a part of), with or without female characters (come to think of it, I can't remember that many male characters in his books either).
Anyway, I stopped taking the Nobel literature prizes all that seriously the moment when I realized that they hadn't given it to Proust (his duchesse de Guermantes is one of the most important female characters in the history of literature) and Kafka.
Sound Editing is voted on by Sound Editor members. There is more peer review in terms of number of peers at the Academy than your average Nature article.
Huh? Doesn't the U.S. have more Nobel laureates than any other country?
This article is about the Nobel prize for literature.
Douglas Prasher getting snubbed for the 2008 Prize in Chemistry while the other three who won that year won because of Prasher’s discovery!
Somorjai getting snubbed in 2007 despite his research partner winning.
Eyring didn’t win because he was a Mormon.
Fritz Haber helped developed poison gas used in World War I, yet he won in 1918, despite the entire raison d’être of Nobel’s mandate.
If we want to talk about Literature, more Swedes have won than the entirety of Asia! Talk about creating a “fictional prize” so that a particular nationality can have prizes too.
The Oscars do have merit and they don’t purport to be international. It’s the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, recognizing excellence in American film; they don’t claim to be an international award, yet Nobel — they explicitly are international oriented. You’re going to say Tolstoy and Mark Twain are less accomplished than Selma Lagerlöf? Really? James Joyce never won a Nobel but Frans Sillanpää did?
Come now.
We agree a Olympic gold is prestigious even though it’s just a sport. We agree Lawrence Olivier was great even though he was just acting. We praise Alan Turing even though he was just a mathematician.
And as you know, Alan Turing pioneered computer science and helped saved millions of lives, so he deserves our respect :-) Perhaps prestige is like natural snowball kind of effect, like how the rich will naturally get richer. A prestigious event becomes somewhat prestigious, so people want to win it. Then more people want to win it. Then it becomes more prestigious, etc.
That has nothing to do with number of viewers though. It is just a dirty trick from FIFA to eliminate competition: national teams in Olympics are junior (U-23) teams because FIFA does not allow senior teams to participate.
In a hundred years, the olympics and the nobel prize could be seen as quaint reminders of an earlier time — entirely without prestige, leaving the observer wondering why we cared so much in the first place.
It's irrelevant to the point, things are prestigious because enough people decide they are. The longest breath holder gets an entry in the Guinness Book and a cocktail icebreaker, a Synchronized Swimming Gold Medalist is always a gold medalist.
Just because something involves a measurement doesn't mean it's completely objective. All the medal tells you objectively is who ran fastest in that particular race, on that particular day, out of the people participating.
There are many subjective factors contributing to that result, and any "excellence" we infer from it is still highly subjective. Indeed, the very notion that running the fastest is something worthy of prestige is a subjective one.
We don't give a gold medal for the fastest people to write from memory an algo for reversing a binary tree, or for the person capable of feeding the most children in a day.
It's completely arbitrary.
Both sports trade on the sexualization of young girls. Why do we even have a sport where the main criteria are older men passing judgment on young girls? The scoring system is vague/complex enough that the “victory” game in both sports is highly rigged anyway, so it’s more about politics than skill when deciding between the top few spots.
Obviously that's not the case.
Athletes may value Olympic Gold more so than gold at a smaller, regional competitions, even when posting better results at the smaller venues ...
Society at large has been "tuned" to regard Olympic Gold as the "gold standard" regardless of whether the athlete performed better at other competitions.
A mathematician that changed the world to a huge degree. No actor or athlete performance drives the greatest innovations of today or wins wars. They are merely entertainers. Useful, but that's it.
This happens a lot in the voting for best animated feature. It is fairly common for an older voter to have seen none of the nominees. He asks his grandchildren what "cartoon" they liked best that year, or remembers which movie's merchandise they frequently wear, and that's the one he votes for.
I remember seeing a couple article at animation publications where they asked a bunch of voters how they voted and why in years where the winner differed from what the majority of people working in animation expected, and found that the "my grandchildren liked it" factor was the main reason.
I wonder how it works for the more technical categories, like best sound editing? Asking your grandchildren "what movie's sound editing did you like this year?" is probably not going to get a useful response.
Sorry about non-English words being sprinkled in though.
At least for the nobel prize in physics I know it's peers who decide and I'd assume it's the same for the other subjects, and it's not just "arbitrary people who have PhDs within the subject" either, it's a few selected ones who are well known in their fields.
The word has meaning because we all agree it has meaning.
Corporations exist because we all agree that corporations exist.
Money has value because we all agree that it has value.
The United States of America exists because we all agree that it exists.
Yes, there is a difference between objective reality and intersubjective reality. But I think you're making too much of that difference.
A huge amount of our everyday world is based entirely off broad mass agreement. The vast majority of the things we interact with in modern life would immediately cease to exist if all the people who believed in them just vanished one day - if an extraterrestrial species arrived on Earth the day after, they would not be able to observe almost anything about our lives. That doesn't mean our reality is fake or that our interaction with it is arbitrary. It just means that it is geopolitically and/or culturally defined.
Bottom line: Yes, social science is hard, but lighten up.
Actually sometimes after hearing about a book or film I think I might be interested in I'll go and read a load of 'normal people' reviews on Amazon or IMDb and they might sway me one way or the other. They may not be skilled reviewers but they use their own words and it helps me ascertain what kind of persons they are and whether their opinions are likely to be in tune with my own. Also I get a spread, rather than niche view.
So I suppose that means that for me, normal people's opinions hold more prestige than the Nobel Committee's.
Iirc my lit friends follow the Man Booker prize more closely; perhaps there are other non-english prizes that could also compete with the swedes.
Why should they have? That's not what the statutes say should be awarded so that particular criticism is a bit unfair.
In the case of nations, we don't have to agree for them to be real. For example, China (the Peoples Republic of China) does not agree that Taiwan (the Republic of China) exists or vice versa, yet both are undeniably real. The same with Serbia and Kosovo.
Some things exist only because of convention or an agreement between people, like the value of a Nobel prize or money.
Other things exist because we can empirically prove that they exist, like protons and gravity. If we all agree that they don't exist, it doesn't make it so.
Yes, they do. The government calling itself the PRC denies the legitimacy of the ROC, and vice versa, but despite each claiming to be the sole legitimate government of the combined territory, each very clearly believes that the other exists, and reacts to the actions of the other and to third parties’ actions toward the other.
Ergo, a prize winner has a powerful social signal that they have done something important. Scarcity does the rest, as there are three or fewer of them every year in a world with perhaps a few hundred thousand practicing physicists.
Part of it is their long history of very good selections.
Part of it is the one million dollar reward.
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-win-a-nobel-prize-a-n...
On github: https://github.com/JoaoAparicio/read-ft-wsj/
Now it's really a scandal.
So it isn't really about choice at this point.
Secondly the reasons for the resignations and turmoil is the unwillingness of some, the majority, of the Academy members to recognize and properly handle the _alleged_ sexual harassment by Jean-Claude Arnault.
To make this matter worse Jean-Claude Arnault is married to an Academy member and the two of them together run a 'culture' organization which is funded and closely related to the Academy.
everyone is innocent until proven guilty.
Nothing has been brought to the police in terms of sexual assault reports. The police report the academy has let go forward is about the corruption/financial issues.
But this guy was given money to run an organization in which I think 14 counts of alleged sexual harassment has been reported.
It would be grossly negligent to continue to sponsor this.
They could've made it up just so he they can kick him out.
Kick him out of what?
He's not and never has been on the committee. His wife is. And no one has been kicked off the committee.
If it's credible, why hasn't he been convicted.
Because building a case strong enough to stand up in court in situations like these is really hard and the police/prosecutors have decided not to priorities it.
But the core of the matter isn't really the sexual harassment, it's the fact that the Academy apparently knew about several cases of both sexual harassment and, more importantly, possible financial fraud/corruption involving this individual and instead of dealing with it, decided to protect him. The sexual harassment charges are just the events that brought these more serious charges to light.
Primarily because he is accused of improperly getting funding from the Academy and she was accused of enabling and profiting from this as well as blocking any further investigation into the matter.
There are also accusations that she prevented the Academy from looking into earlier accusation of sexual harassment against her husband, but that is secondary.
So it's the ideal ground for character assassinations?
Especially since society doesn't blame/shame the victims anymore (which is good) -- so someone wrongfully accusing has all the upside and no downsides (which is bad).
When the Academy issued an internal investigation by a lawyer firm, the report they got back had very little to say about the alleged sexual harassments. It did however recommend that they should report the corruption and for some reason the Academy decide against it. After some major public outcry covering mostly the alleged sexual harassments, the Academy suddenly turned about and are now following the recommendation and has reported the corruption to the police.
What I would like to think is that the corruption charges would have come up to light regardless of the sexual harassment accusations, but I guess thats the current political climate in Sweden. Now it is being used as a proxy to address the sexual harassment accusations which is extremely suboptimal.
How about their don't recognize or handle anything?
If Jean-Claude Arnault is guilty of sexual harassment, let him legally go to jail / pay a fine / serve community service or whatever.
That's for the law to decide.
They can then take them off the academy (or not) -- if he is convicted.
Otherwise, it's not their business to do anything about it, and even less so for something "alleged".
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree here. If a company or organization receives multiple independent accusations against someone, it is absolutely their business to look into it and decide if this is a person they want to keep being involved with, completely separate from any police involvement. It may even be their business to bring this information to the police and provide any evidence they may have if the accusations are serious enough.
At most companies just the serious suspicion of financial fraud, repeated sexual harassment or the covering up of these is plenty enough to get you fired.
Not really, and not their job. If we wanted that, we could always set a higher bar for the criminal justice system.
>Lots of bad behaviors aren't criminal, or aren't usually prosecuted, but should still be grounds for removal.
In this case we're not talking about chewing gum on a board meeting, or treating employees bad (e.g. shouting at them) or something like that.
We're talking about actual criminal behaviors -- but only "alleged" ones. Those should be handled legally or not at all.
Else not a point in having a legal system, if any accusation can lead to "mob justice" or ad-hoc measures against someone.
Despite that being the part of the scandal that kicked off the investigation and has been getting the most focus, it's not the core of the scandal. The other parts of the scandal is that a venue owned by the above mentioned "lecherous boor" in question (who is married to an academy member) had possibly been getting improper funding from the Academy and that he might have leaked previous winners to his friends in advance.
The academy themselves announcing that there will be no prize this year is a way to avoid the humiliation of being kicked out from that role by the Nobel foundation.