Book News: Nobel Judge Dismisses U.S. Literature
Michael Rogers -- Library Journal, 10/1/2008 9:06:00 AM
- Horace Engdahl claims Europe is “center of the literary world”
- Says U.S. writers are “too sensitive to trends in their mass culture”
- American literati fire back
On the eve of selection for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Horace Engdahl, one of the Swedish Academy’s 16 judges, has bad mouthed American literature, the Associated Press reports. “Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures,” he told the AP, “but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe is the center of the literary world…not the United States.” Engdahl further claims that American authors are “too sensitive to their own mass culture…the U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.” Outraged American publishers and literary organizations responded immediately: “You would think that the permanent secretary of the academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures,” New Yorker editor David Remnick fired back.
Offering to send Engdahl a reading list, National Book Foundation executive director Harold Augenbraum said that “such a comment makes me think that Mr. Engdahl has read very little of American literature outside the mainstream and has a very narrow view of what constitutes literature in this age.” The last American Nobel winner was Toni Morrison in 1993. [See In the Bookroom blog for additional coverage on this story.]
