The Department of Scandinavian presents a talk by:

Max Richter, LMU Munich

Competition in literature is (and always has been) fierce: attention is scarce, book sales are highly contested, critical acclaim even more so. Such assertions are widely accepted, yet archival studies of concrete implementations of literary competition at specific times can further our understanding of how it has evolved historically. Max Richter’s project on the prehistory and early years of the world’s most famous literary prize, the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded by the Swedish Academy since 1901, contributes to this field of research. In his talk, he will propose that the prize generated new logics of both recognition and recognizability in the competitive distribution of literary value, and that it differed significantly from its predecessors with regard to the status of an author’s name. To illustrate this, he will present selected sources from his project’s case studies, ranging from submissions to the Swedish Academy’s anonymous prize competitions that preceded the Nobel Prize, to English translations of Verner von Heidenstam’s poems, and to advertisement in the film industry in the 1910s and 1920s. Focusing on practices of “name-making,” Richter will argue that the rise of the Nobel Prize as a global brand of literary quality was intertwined with substantial changes in the modes and media of publicity, popularity, and fame in transnational literary fields at the turn of the century.