Valuation in Literary Infrastructures

The career paths of literary authors are imbued with processes of valuation; so are the paths that literary works travel on the literary market. The funding of literary projects and persons, the shaping of literary careers through stipends and residencies, the gatekeeping of publishers, the negotiation of authorial rights, the decision-making in the process of editing, literary awards and prizes—these are just some practices of today’s literary field that are based on explicit and implicit criteria of literary value. This section examined these practices with view to how they construct certain ideas of literature and hierarchies of literary values, focusing specifically on the distribution of power in the practices of valuation and in the resulting relations within the literary field. CONVERSATIONS explored how race, class, gender, and other factors come into play in all infrastructures that attribute symbolic and economic value to literary works.

CONVERSATIONS is an experimental format that brings together two experts in an unmoderated discussion. The participants are invited to start with an opening statement that reacts to the question formulated in the title of the CONVERSATION. The format is inspired by the conversations during conference coffee breaks as a type of exchange that we find as productive as it is informal. In accordance with this framework, the format forgoes the Q&A, offering the audience the possibility to pose questions during the subsequent ROUNDTABLE AND AUDIENCE DISCUSSION instead.