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Tone Clusters: the Joyce Carol Oates discussion group archive

Thursday, October 07, 2004

RE: JCO: Nobel prize

Alas, we'll have to keep waiting for JCO to win. Below is an article from today's NY Times describing the Austrian winner. I'm not familiar with her work.
-Karen


Austrian Writer Wins Nobel in Literature

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS



Filed at 10:36 a.m. ET

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- Austrian feminist writer Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel Prize in literature, the Swedish Academy said Thursday, citing her ``musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays.''

The decision to award the prize to a woman, and a poet, was the first since 1996, when Wislawa Szymborska of Poland won. Since the prize first was handed out in 1901, only nine women have won it.

Jelinek, 57, made her literary debut with the collection ``Lisas Schatten'' in 1967. Her writing took a critical turn after her involvement with the student movements that were prevalent throughout Europe in the 1970s, coming out with her satirical novel ``We Are Decoys, Baby!''

That was followed by other works, including ``Wonderful, Wonderful Times'' in 1990 and ``The Piano Teacher'' in 1988, which was made into an acclaimed film in 2001 by director Michael Haneke and starred Isabelle Huppert.

The novel, and the film, tells the story of a veteran piano teacher, Erika, a harsh and demanding taskmistress who indulges her extreme sexual tastes with hardcore pornography and voyeurism. She becomes sexually involved with a student -- but only under her terms and dictates.

She had a best seller in 1989 with ``Lust,'' which she has described as portraying ``the violence by the man against the woman'' in a conventional marriage.

The academy noted that Jelinek is controversial in Austria, which she depicted as a realm of death in her phantasmagorical novel ``Die Kinder der Toten.''

In 2000, she instructed her publishers to withhold the performance rights of her plays from all Austrian theaters as long as the party of rightist leader Joerg Haider was part of the government.

``Her writing builds on a lengthy Austrian tradition of linguistically sophisticated social criticism, with precursors such as Johann Nepomuk Nestroy, Karl Kraus, Odon von Horvath, Elias Canetti, Thomas Bernhard and the Wiener Group,'' the academy said in its citation.

``The nature of Jelinek's texts is often hard to define. They shift between prose and poetry, incantation and hymn, they contain theatrical scenes and filmic sequences.''

Her recent works are variations on one of her basic feminist themes: the seeming inability of women to find themselves fully and live out their lives in a world where they are glossed over as stereotypes.

The 18 lifetime members of the 218-year-old Swedish Academy, of whom only four are women, made the annual selection in secrecy last week.

Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite who endowed the awards, left only vague guidance about the prize, saying in his will that it should go to those who ``shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind'' and ``who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.''

For any writer, there could hardly be any greater honor than winning the Nobel Prize. But for an author whose work is not widely translated, it opens doors to new markets, and sales.

The prize also brings a financial security net, too: A check of more than $1.3 million.

The academy has given the award to Europeans nine times in the last 10 years.

Since 1980, only three winners have come from Africa, four from South America, two from the United States and one from Asia. It's been 14 years since someone from the Middle East -- Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz -- was given the nod.

Last year's award went to South African writer J.M. Coetzee, whose fiction drew on his experiences growing up there. In 2002, the prize went to Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz, whose fiction drew on his experience as a teenager in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

This year's award announcements began Monday with the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine going to Americans Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck for their work on the sense of smell.

On Tuesday, Americans David J. Gross, H. David Politzer and Frank Wilczek won the physics prize for their explanation of the force that binds particles inside the atomic nucleus. Their work has helped science get closer to ``a theory for everything,'' the academy said in awarding the prize.

The chemistry prize was awarded Wednesday to Israelis Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko and American Irwin Rose for their work in discovering a process that lets cells destroy unwanted proteins.

The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel will be announced Oct. 11.

The winner of the coveted peace prize -- the only one not awarded in Sweden -- will be announced Friday in Oslo, Norway.

The prizes, which also include a gold medal and a diploma, are presented on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-jco@usfca.edu on behalf of Cyranomish@aol.com
Sent: Thu 10/7/2004 11:02 AM
To: jco@usfca.edu
Cc:
Subject: Re: JCO: Nobel prize



Thanks, Bjorn: Which country? A woman? Poet, play or novels?
Cyrano

In a message dated 10/7/2004 9:39:04 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
bjorn.hj@mail.com writes:

<< Elfriede Jelinek, to bad... Our academy vanted to be "advanced".

Björn >>
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