Political Correctness + Nobel Prize

[John King <fs6y097@public.uni-hamburg.de>]

I think I shall steer clear of discussing the Nobel prize issue, as I do
not know enough about the history of that institution. Generally, I think
it must be pretty obvious that literary prizes are all about inclusion and
exclusion from particular establishments and the award is thus also an
ideological statement. I for one do not believe that there is an innocent
aesthetics - choices of "good" and "bad" literature are in many instances
predetermined by a matrix of social conditioning, historical conjunctions
and political positions. And that's leaving personal prejudices and
politics quite out of the equation. 

I have to say I think it incredibly unlikely that Jünger will ever get
it, but then he's managed to collect quite enough literary prizes anyway -
and they mostly seemed to cause the usual political storm. Cf. Goethe
Prize and the prize in 1968 (?) that led to the Anti-EJ issue of the
"Streit-Zeit-Schrift". 

> > Who would the only Academy member be who knew about Italian
> > literature ? A name would be interesting. By the way, it would be
> > interesting to learn what Italian authors you might believe are suitable
> > for the prize. Come on, are'nt we a little nationalistic now ?

Eco?

> You should know that Italians can be nationalistic only when it comes 
> to soccer and food.

and clothes? 

> As for misconstructing, I probably misconstructed my sentence;  I 
> should have added "no matter how good his/her writings can be".
> 

Didn't Bertil mean "misconstrued"?

> And now the issue of political correctness:  the core of the
> "politically correct" doctrine (which is a widespread theory in
> Anglo-Saxon academia today) is that you evaluate literary text on the
> basis of their political content and not on the basis of their
> literary qualities.  The Nobel prize to Solgenitsin (sorry, I used

Umberto, "political correctness" is not just a US phenomena, although the
phrase was first coined there. Germany also has a huge dose of it. And it
applies, as I see it, to a wide range of university political practice. 
The reason is quite simple - only in the academy (in the most general
sense) does the Feminist/Green/Marxist/Anti-Fascist/whatever Left actually
wield much in the way of power - like controlling courses, hiring and
firing professors, legitmating knowledge, etc. And in the student bodies,
the Left as a whole tends to dominate political discourse. "Political
correctness", as I see it, is basically the dominance in the Universities
of left critiques and ideologies of emancipation which tend to the
exclusion or silencing of the Other through the exercise of political
power. Paradoxically, it is often against an exclusion of Others, that
they themselves are protesting. 

An interesting comment on the future of sociology from the UK sociologist
Zygmunt Baumann in a recent article of his suggests that all these left
academic discourses circulate in a closed system - in other words that
they are profoundly irrelevant and ignored by the rest of society, which
keeps on functioning in its nasty old capitalistic way. "Real politics" 
exists and functions mostly outside the academy. "Political correctness" 
thus remains a loud irritation for most people in the Uni, and an object 
of ridicule for most people outside it. 

And EJ was never politically correct. Even in Weimar he was an outsider 
on the fringes of the Conservative Revolution. 

As the Americans say, that's my 2 cents.

Best wishes from the Uni HH.

John