On my way to work I listened to Menand’s (The New Yorker) review of a new and hip book, the Economy of prestige, about literary prizes. It discusses the mechanisms by which fame is created and propagated (literary awards are the negative yardstick against which positive achievement is measured). Bruce Hoppe from “Connectedness” untangles the importance of the book and of the New Yorker review thusly.
Connectedness: The Economy of Prestige
Louis Menand’s review of The Economy of Prestige, published in this week’s New Yorker magazine, sums up English’s thesis as the delightfully counterintuitive notion that the main value of literary prizes is that they give us something to rail against. As long as critics rant annually about how hopelessly misguided awards committees are, and how they fail utterly in the task of appreciating true art, then we know that deep down, the prestige of art remains unchallenged. Therefore, English notes the increasing willingness of authors and critics to buy into the credibility of awards as the death knell of the awards themselves. After all, who will care about literary awards when we have reduced literary merit to something that can be measured by a committee?