FS 301: The Nobel Prize:
How Books Work in the Age of Mass Media
Instructor: Katherine Arens k.arens@mail.utexas.edu
Office: Germanic Studies, EPS 3.128
Office Phone: 232-6363 or 471-4123
Office Hours:T TH 8-9:25 and by appointment
Class Meets: Monday 10:00 AM to 12:00 noon; CBA 4.338 (Unique # 33400)
In 1999, Günter Grass, author of The Tin Drum (1959), and other controversial, social-critical novels, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was the seventh German, and the eleventh German-language author to be so awarded; the media was not slow in noting that Grass was the sixth European in a row to receive the prize. This seminar will use the example of Grass’s novel and his Nobel Prize to discuss "how books work" in the modern world of publishing. That is, we will discuss how books are made, marketed, translated, remade into films, and turned into objects of political debate. We will read the books, see the movies, and see what can happen to them at every stage of the process.