A Study Of The Cultural Production Of The Man Booker Prize

The Man Booker Prize is a trademark of the British literary culture. The prize was founded by the British book industry in the hope of securing a sustainable market for the literary products so as to generate the economic value on the one hand, and promoting the reception of the products by the members of the society to increment the symbolic value on the other hand. This production logic of value-increment determines that the cultural production of the prize is constituted by a series of material production practice and symbolic constructions.Based on the theories of "prestige economy" and "the world literary space", this thesis constructs a model that examines the cultural production of literary prize as follows:the production system of the prize as influenced by the interacting mode of the prize agents marked by heterogeneity; the regularities concerning value-increment of the text in the process of the cultural production; the generation and dissemination of the cultural value in the phase of the mass communications of the prize; the struggle among the heterogeneous prize agents for the power of the production of cultural value. This thesis is intended to contribute to the theory of cultural production through an examination of the mode, mechanism, regularities of the cultural production of the Booker prize. It also aims to reexamine the theory of the cultural production through an analysis of the double-production mechanisms of the Booker prize. Moreover, it investigates into the issue of literary globalization through examing the struggle and negotiations between Britain and its former colonies for the power of the production of cultural value in the transnational space of production.This dissertation consists of the following parts:The introductory part offers a review of the Man Booker Prize scholarship to foreground the cultural production of it as the field of the research of this thesis, and puts forward a research model based on the theory of the "world literary space" as put forward by Casanova and the theory of "economy of prestige" by English.Chapter One, "the Historical Development of the Cultural Production of the Booker Prize", analyzes the characteristics of the cultural production of the Man Booker Prize in the different phases of its development so as to reveal the formation of its productivity and its production space under the agents’motivation for cultural innovation. The space of the cultural production of the prize is hierarchically structured with London serving as the center.Chapter Two, "the Elements of the Production Structure of the Man Booker Prize", deals with the interacting relationships between the prize agents and the roles they play in the production system. The major prize agents, including the writers, the judges, the publishers, are all marked by heterogeneous constituents. Due to the uneven distribution of the literary resources, Britain, with rich literary resources and accumulated literary capital, occupies the center of the literary space of the Anglo-phone literature. The contending writers, the Anglo-British writers, the ethnic writers of Britain, and the writers from the developing countries and developed countries of Commonwealth, are put in different positions in this space; The prize agents form a cultural alliance with a belief in the prize for an exchange of the capitals in a desirable way. The cultural production of the Booker Prize depends on the collective productivity of the prize agents.Chapter Three, "Productivity of Cannonizing Function of the Man Booker Prize", is centered around the case study of Midnight’s Children and Life of Pi, discussing the agency of writers, judges, publishers, the media and the readers in the three phases of the cultural production. These two cases are symptomatic of the production practice in the eighties and new millennium respectively, reflecting the changes in cultural production of the prize as a cultural institution.Chapter Four, "the Production of the Cultural Public Sphere with the Man Booker Prize as a Medium", analyzes the emergence of a cultural public sphere, where the prize agents are converted into spokespersons of the communities they represent, discussing public issues concerning multiculturalism, identity politics and democracy. The publishing capital and the electronic capital are integrated into the cultural production of the literary prize to give birth to a cultural public sphere, which is a manifestation of the confluence between literary space and the cultural, economic and political fields.Finally, this thesis reexamines the nature of productivity of the cultural production of the literary prize. Due to the agents’motivation for innovation and democratization of politics, the prize is not to produce the standardized products of literature. Instead, it is to produce cultural goods in a paradoxically heterogeneous and homogeneous way. The double production mechanisms are manefested in the cultural production of the prize concerning its material practice and symbolic constructions.