Literature goes meta

A relatively recent New Yorker article by Louis Menand reviewed James English's The Economy of Prestige and Pascale Casanova's "rather brilliant" The World Republic of Letters. Both discuss the interplay of the global literary economy and the system of awards that has grown up around it. They seek to understand trends that make works of world literature transcendent, whether they eschew place with a (Western) null environment or embrace a local and exotic place and culture, using the particular to get at universal truths. And how literary awards denote value (but in a strange way only because there is the possibility for argument over which works were actually more deserving). It was a little complicated, and I read it a while ago. But it's worth taking a look at. For example:

Of course, as English and Casanova would agree, books are read on this side of the looking glass. We are ourselves products of the culture whose products we consume, and we can’t help taking it, for the most part, on its own terms. Still, their very strong books belong to a general challenge to the usual practices of literary pedagogy. Literature departments are almost always organized by language and country, but Casanova’s book gives us many reasons to doubt whether this captures the way literature really works. She has an excellent account, for example, of the international influence of Faulkner—once his novels had been translated into French. ... Faulkner was the novelist of the American South who demonstrated to novelists of the global South how to represent a marginal community in an advanced literary style, a style that could gain the respect of “Paris.”
English’s and Casanova’s books also challenge the conventional “shock of recognition” idea of influence, which imagines literary history as one soul speaking to another across time and space. The soul may speak, but the international context is the reason it is heard.
...
Literature is conventionally taught as a person-to-person aesthetic experience: the writer (or the poem) addressing the reader. Teachers cut out English’s middlemen, the people who got the poem from the writer to us, apparently confirming his point that we have to deny the economics of cultural value in order to preserve the aesthetics (emphasis mine).

With the examples given by the article (and I guess by English and Casanova) this makes for an interesting exploration of how we assign certain works (A Million Little Pieces anyone?) value in our society.