News Reporter: Act Four: For the Nobel prize, what counts as literature?

Friday, 14 October 2016

Act Four: For the Nobel prize, what counts as literature?

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

Bob Dylan’s records lie in a record store in Munich, Germany, on Oct. 13. (Svene Hoppe Illustration/European Pressphoto Agency)

The news that Bob Dylan had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature seems to have split observers into two camps (three, if you count people whose basic and correct position on the award is always “Philip Roth was robbed”). There are those, including me, who are delighted to see the idea of “literature” expand to include popular music, auguring the future inclusion of other mediums, and those who see Dylan’s win as odd and unfitting especially at a moment when there are plenty of other novelists and writers who haven’t been recognized (among them many from other countries, people of color and women).

My basic feeling is this: An award given once annually is always going to be insufficient to recognize every artist who has made staggering contributions to world literature. If we’re concerned with keeping the pool small so, say, all great novelists or all great poets will eventually get their due, that project is ultimately doomed.

A broader understanding of “literature” will make the Nobel Prize more competitive. But opening up our understanding of what fits within that umbrella also means more expansive thinking about what great stories and great writing look like. If your primary concern about the prize is representation, it’s not as if women, or people of color, haven’t made major contributions in genres like music, film and television. And given that stories by and about women and people of color are often shoved out of the category of literature and categorized as merely “popular,” moving away from rigidly traditional ideas about what constitutes “literature” is fine with me.

And at the end of the day, Alfred Nobel signed his will and testament in 1895, when the phonograph was still young and long before the technological developments that made many new art forms possible. Maybe we could all do better to focus on his vision of an award for “outstanding work in an ideal direction,” no matter what medium it comes in.