Nobel Prize in Literature Picks and Rationale Assignment
- Due No Due Date
- Points 7
- Submitting a file upload
If they keep to their announced schedule, the Swedish Academy will name the winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. This provides us an opportunity to consider in a practical way some of the concerns related to being a student of literature: what writers are worth paying attention to, how "fair", really, is our view of where the best literature can be found, what makes a writer and what he or she writes important or award-worthy, etc.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is the longest running prize there is for authors--and is the most lucrative (winners get the equivalent of about a million dollars).
These awards have frequently been the source of some controversy, but in the past four years, extremely so. In short, the Swedish Academy has a credibility problem that threatens the credibility of their authority to matter in the future, so who they choose this year has to be someone who will strike most of the world as a worthy pick.
Your task will be to explore the issues related to making this choice and to choose your top three picks and make a case for why you think one of these three will be the winner. Kind of a fantasy literature league thing.
Pick, in order of likelihood, the three writers you think will win this year's Nobel Prize in Literature and write a paragraph or two for each explaining why you have chosen each.
We'll use the Ladbrokes betting page for the award (Links to an external site.) to give us our choices. If the school's network blocks this page, you can use this list, Download use this list, which includes some additional information about country of origin, language, age, gender, etc. that may be worth considering as you make your picks.
You should read this page from the Literary Saloon (Links to an external site.) and click through the links to familiarize yourself with the recent history of this award (controversies and scandals abound!) and why some writers may or may not have an edge in getting the prize.
Please also take a look at a very brief history of how the award came to be (Links to an external site.) and a short description of what Alfred Nobel's will sets forth as the criteria for getting the Literature Prize (Links to an external site.). There are other links you'll find on these pages that you may wish to look at as your interest dictates.
Things to consider in making your choices:
- How much faith do you have in the odds? Ladbrokes, after all, is mainly a sports betting site.
- What risks and rewards are there for picking a writer from one place or another? A woman vs. a man? A person of color vs. someone white? Someone from the west vs. elsewhere.
- In the past forty or so years, the Committee that grants the prize has some history of making choices that spread the award around for seeming political, social, gender reasons (You might think here about how all-conference honors are awarded. The people who make those choices have to think similarly about how may choices from a certain school is too many, the need to spread the honors around the conference, etc.). You can see a list of who's won the award and where they're from here (Links to an external site.).
Once you're ready, do the following:
- Create a document that lists your three picks for this year's Nobel Prize in literature. Rank them: 1st, 2nd 3rd.
- For each author, write 1-2 paragraphs explaining why you think the writer will win. In order to do this intelligently, you will need to do some light research on any of the authors you wish to consider. Just Google their names. Wikipedia and/or authors' pages are sufficient for getting a sense of what they do, where they're from, etc. If you want to read through some of the debate and commentary by people who are more experienced and passionate than we are, click into some of the links in the fifth and sixth paragraphs of the Literary Saloon piece (Links to an external site.).
- If you quote or paraphrase from any outside source, be sure to do the things you need to do in order to avoid plagiarism. You do not need to do a works cited page.
- Better responses (and higher grades) will go to those responses that are thoughtful and that reveal understanding of the issues described above, so please take your time with this.
- You should complete this before class ends today or within the parameters relevant for you if you are absent in an "at-home" status.
- Please remember to do all the MLA 8 stuff regarding header and page #, heading, font, spacing, etc.
This assignment is worth 7 points. +1 to any student who correctly picks the winning author as his first choice.
Rubric
Criteria | Ratings | Pts |
---|---|---|
7-0 scale
7: A+, 6.5: A, 6: B, 5:C, 4.6:D, 4:F, 0:Did not do/cheat
threshold:
pts
|
pts
--
|