The Man Booker International Prize

The nominees for the 2009 Man Booker International Prize are Peter Carey (Australia), Evan S. Connell (USA), Mahasweta Devi (India), E. L. Doctorow (USA), James Kelman (UK), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), Arnost Lustig (Czechoslovakia), Alice Munro (Canada), V. S. Naipaul (Trinidad/India), Joyce Carol Oates (USA), Antonio Tabucchi (Italy), Ngugi Wa Thiong'o (Kenya), Dubravka Ugrešić (Croatia) and Ludmila Ulitskaya (Russia).


I really like this list: it remedied a lot of the structural issues that plague the international prize circuit: for instance, the dominance of novels over short stories (Munro, the premier short story writer of our time, is on the list) as well as the dominance of the Anglophone (not only are Tabucchi, Vargas Llosa, and Ugrešić on, but Devi, Ngugi, and Ulitskaya are writers from Anglophone countries who have written partially or entirely in languages other than English. (Ulitskaya seems to live most of the time in the US). In addition, Connell, Ulitskaya, Devi, and Lustig have all been underrated by the mainstream Anglophone press (though most have received respectful notices) and Devi has the additional non-commercial appeal of being principally championed in the US by a well-known postmodern theorist (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak).

I tend to think none of the non-American Anglophone writers (Carey, Munro, Naipaul, Kelman) will win because they are already eligible for the regular Booker Prize, and with the exception of Munro have won at least once. (besides, Chinua Achebe won last time). Munro may, though, transcend this limitation as her practice in the short-story format has never been Booker-friendly. Given that this prize was ostensibly set up to honor Philip Roth, it is funny not to see Roth on the list: Oates, Doctorow, and Connell are all eminently deserving (it is especially nice to see the much-underrated Connell given a nod) and they might want to commend America for having the grace ot elect a Democratic president, but I still would bet against any of these winning. Ugrešić is known as much as a social commentator than as a novelist, and, though I may be underrating her work, does not seem of the same stature as the rest. This leaves Ngugi, Devi, Tabucchi, Lustig, Vargas Llosa. I can see any of these getting it, and all would deserve it. Vargas Llosa’s eligibility may have been helped by his having, as my colleague Juan De Castro has observed, distanced himself from the rightist associations he has often cultivated, for instance making positive remarks about President Obama and critiquing religious fundamentalism. I have an interest here—I am currently working on Vargas Llosa—but it would be a great tribute to a writer always at the center of both political and literary currents who has produced buoyantly, abundantly, and with continually high quality.

Calgary drama

One of the highlights of my visit to Calgary last week was seeing the highly laureled Canadian playwright Judith Thompson’s Palace of The End. This play was put on in New York last year and won a prominent award, and has also been prominently staged in Toronto, but, as so often, I had missed it until steered ot it by the need to find something to do in Calgary on a Saturday night. The play consists of three monologues by individuals relating to the Iraq War and its backstory—Lynndie England; David Kelly, and a woman based on a real-life individual who se family was an early victim of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. What struck me, aside from the intense, mesmerizing, yet necessarily disturbing performances, is how simultaneously passionate and nonjudgmental the playwright’s implied view of her subjects is. England’s affectlessness and narcissistic sadism, Kelly’s tormented, guilty indecisiveness (brilliantly acted by Stephen Hair, a well-known Calgary performer who was really superb), and the Iraqi woman’s bewildered rage at the cruelty of those who vie for power are highly articulated in discursive terms yet are given from within; subjectivity does not detract from adequacy to the material. For this reason, I think this play will well outlast its immediate circumstances, and may well be a principal lens through which we look back at Iraq and its reverberations thirty years from now. I particularly appreciated the way England was looked down on not because she was uneducated and from an often dismissed part of the country, but because she participated in unconscionably cruel acts. The journalist Tara McKelvey, who interviewed England, gave a talk at my university recently, and made a similar point; that cruelty can come from people in all walks and from all stations of life, and, as Thompson shows, in this context, from both Iraqis and Americans.

Shakespeare the 'individual'?

A colleague questioned my assertion, in a curse description, that Shakespeare is the individual in world literature who is most prominent as a producer of world literature. The Bible and "Homer" may have had a more durable influence, but the Bible, even in the most fundamentalist construction, is confessedly of multiple authorship, and few hold to the idea of an individual Homeric author these days. (And even so. Homer's unavailability during the Western Middle Ages 'hurts' him in this respect). One could think of other figures from other linguistic traditions who have an even greater range than Shakespeare, like Goethe, but Goethe is not read the way Shakespeare is. Cervantes may be a possibility, but his chief creation may overshadow him. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky are more recent and just have not had quite the same impact either in depth or durability. One tires to avoid Anglocentric or bardolatric rhetoric, but I think the assertion is simply incontestable, Even of, as is certainly plausible, one sees the individuality of Shakespeare as an ascribed effect or readership, ideology, and reception-history, it still is an individual who is being so interpellated, and not an accretion of tradition, and there is no other individual who has been positioned this way....

Joyce or Kafka?

In one of my classes, we have been batting around in my class the assertion made by a writer friend of mine that "Joyce used to be the most influential author of the 20th century; now it is Kafka," This excited some very interesting positions pro and con. The idea of Kafka's influence is, I assume, in magic realism, the interplay between high fiction and genre fiction such as horror, fantasy, and sci fi, and a more felt political imperative, and this had influences beyond Joyce's 'merely' formal and experimental ones.......this has its temptations, but I wonder if what my friend was really saying was, Kafka's German-Jewish-Czech political context was more interesting than Joyce's Anglo-Irish-Catholic one, and I am not sure if this is true, certainly the influence of Joyce on postcolonial fiction belies this..and I also wonder if the more important idea is just that K and J are comparable....

Death of a Centenarian

Edward Upward, the contemporary of Auden, Spender, et al. has died at the incredible age of 105.

He is in a way the British parallel to Henry Roth in the US, in terms of early promise, not writing for many years for ideological reasons, and then resuming very late in life.

I always liked the fact that he was named "Upward" and wrote a book called The Spiral Ascent.

Barthes, Benjamin: Minor/Major?

My colleague Mark Greif, one of the editors of n + 1, has a brilliant and incisive article on Susan Sontag in the current London Review of Books, which--a rare phenomenon for work on a figure who usually evokes such polarized reactions--treats Sontag judiciously and thoughtfully values her strengths and weaknesses. One point of interest is Greif's assertion that Sontag seldom wrote on major thinkers; I take, and accept, his general drift, but wonder if Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin, on whom Sontag wrote extensively and indeed were, in the middle-to-late portion of her career, virtually adopted by her as her signature thinkers, are exceptions. Admittedly, neither are systematic; but both in terms of their influence and the breadth of their work--which in each case ranges across fields, disciplines, national literatures, proprietary discourses, might be said to make an exception in their case. Also, I am interested--in the wake of my recently completed book on theory--on Barthes and Benjamin as figures of the middle ground, people who do not usually or typically evoke the fiery reactions that Derrida and Foucault often inspire. Does their lack of system, their epistemic modesty, their aphoristic, staccato mien, make them more beloved? Do they seem more literary, less philosophical? Would the people who find Derrida and Foucault so indigestible have felt the same about Kant and Schiller in their own, as-yet-undomesticated day?

How online is our online teaching?

As part of my responsibilities at my university. I teach one online course per term. I started doing this very early, before the Internet, much less Web 2.0, really evolved, I am wondering if my complaints below are not so much inadequacies of my students but residues of the involuntary text-centeredness of online pedagogy's early years.


Several people in my current class have reported that they were not able to get the assigned textbooks on time through the bookstore, and I pointed out that all the early stories were in the public domain and easily available as e-texts (I provided several links), often with helpful and useful commentary. But they are not reading these e-texts, they are waiting for the book to arrive, and so falling behind their colleagues. My students do not seem acclimated to reading e-texts (I noticed this in my Greek drama course in fall 2008 as well where often I would post e-texts of alternate translations, vital for understanding the idea of literature in translation--David Grene's, Richmomd Lattimore's, David Slavitt's Sophocles all being so different, and all three different from Victorian translations). Nor do they appear particularly interested in the video clips and images I go to great lengths to post. I also post scholarly articles; these I do not expect most of them to look at, but they are also a possibility afforded by the Web that they seem reluctant to embrace. I wonder if I should make an assignment involving these mandatory, or make it mandatory that they read the e-texts? I wonder if from now on I should not just assign any print books of anything available as an e-text?

In short, their viewpoint is very text-centered. They do very well within that compass, but the online environment offers such a more multimedia experience, such a chance to be at home in the Internet rather than simply use it as a venue for a prepackaged course. I feel a lot of the potential innovation and creativity of the Internet is being left by the wayside. Perhaps a longer course time would address this issue, make it more possible to use more modes. Or perhaps I just need to incorporate the multimedia structure within my assignment frame and apparatus.

Part of the problem may be that my institution uses Blackboard and not a Facebook-like software such as DruPal, but I am not sure a change in platform alone would reshape the underlying syndrome.

part of my puzzlement is that I look at YouTube for fun, and basically read scholarly articles for fun, and I mean by adding them to the course to create fun extras; my students, though, seem to perceive them as supernumerary add-ons, and even burdens. Perhaps it is I who need the readjustment.