Diffuse consecration: How modes of authorship shape literary prizes

This article takes a fresh look at Pierre Bourdieu's notion of consecration by applying a mixed methods approach to the way authorship unfolds around the Nobel Prize. Drawing on both conceptual literary history and corpus-assisted discourse analysis, the case study of Herta Müller's ‘unexpected’ win in 2009 is taken as a starting point for establishing how different ‘modes of authorship’ play out in different contexts and at different scales. Conceptually speaking, ‘modes of authorship’ develop further Jérôme Meizoz's work on ‘literary posture’ (2007, 2011), expressing how multiple actors, human and non-human alike, convey attitude within the networks that cohere around literature. Newspaper coverage of Müller's win at different points in time and place, together with paratextual material (book covers, front/end matter) that pre- and post-dates the Nobel award, is analysed to identify modes of authorship associated with Nobel winners. Our analysis documents how the scandals that periodically ensue when an ‘unlikely’ author wins point to a much more diffuse notion of consecration than traditional field theory allows. This is better captured through a network-inspired ontology of authorship than through the inferential approaches more standardly offered by literary theory.