Le Clezio's Nobel Prize Lecture
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio’s Nobel Prize lecture, In the Forest of Paradoxes, (also available as a pdf file) was released last night. It takes its title and starting point from a provocative passage from Stig Dagerman’s Essaer och texter: How is it possible on the one hand, for example, to behave as if ...
>
Toni Morrison on U.S. Insularity
French translator Alison Anderson pointed me to this article from Bibliobs the literary section of the weekly French newsmagazin Nouvel Observateur. Interesting what Toni Morrison has to say about the Horace Engdahl/American insularity situation: Toni Morrison. – Je pense que ces propos reflètent effectivement, ...
>
Nobel for Literature
As reported everywhere in the damn world, French novelist Jean Marie Gustave le Clézio has been awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature. So says the Swedish Academy: “[He is an] author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning ...
>
Boom Goes the Dynamite!
A number of people had emailed or called me about the controversial statements made by Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary Horace Engdahl about American writing, basically stating that the U.S. is too culturally insular to have a writer worthy of the Nobel Prize. (The last American to win was Toni Morrison in ...
>
Doris Lessing gets her Nobel
Doris Lessing last night formally received her Nobel prize for literature, saying: “Thank you does not seem enough.” Ill health prevented Lessing, 88, from travelling to Sweden for a Nobel presentation in December. Instead, a ceremony took place for the prolific author at the Wallace Collection in ...
>
Jews, Language and the Nobel Prize
The Forward excerpts from a new book by Ruth Wisse called Jews and Power. In a discussion of the linguistic adaptability of Jews, she recounts the number of Jews who have won the Nobel Prize, and the number of languages in which they won the Prize. Since the inauguration of the Nobel Prizes at the beginning of the ...
>
Nobel Prize for Literature
Cafe Babel has a short piece about the history of the Nobel Prize, or to be more specific, a short history of some of the controversies, such as Sartre rejecting the prize, Tolstoy being overlooked, etc. But what caught my eye is this paragraph at the bottom: Today, the Nobel Prize is faced with new accusations of ...
>