Neohelicon
Volume/Issue:
Volume 34: Issue 1
On the significance of capitalization: The value of literature with capital L
Author:
Reingard Nethersole University of the Witwatersrand Graduate School for the Humanities and Social Sciences Johannesburg Private Bag X3 Wits 2050 South Africa Johannesburg Private Bag X3 Wits 2050 South Africa

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Pages:
79–91
Online Publication Date:
27 Apr 2007
Publication Date:
27 Jun 2007
Article Category:
Research Article
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-007-1008-8
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Abstract  

The essay rehearses the often obscured entanglement of Literature and value by taking at its premise the historical emergence of the concept of literary value as tied to the realm of economics in the 18th century. A brief genealogical investigation of their confluence shows the privileged ontological status of Literature as a function of discourse implicated in classical economics’ labour theory of value that accompanies also the birth of aesthetic judgement. Once at the apex of the Humanities, where the knowledge of literary texts signified cultural achievement, ‘the worth of the value’ of Bildung (education), of capitalised Literature and of reading has diminished greatly in today’s world. Under threat by entrepreneurialism made possible by new advancing and exponentially expanding digital mnemotechnical devices that are overtaking print culture, the study of Literature, and with it the Humanities, are losing ground. Interest in questions of ‘literary value’, together with renewed reflection on the “singularity” of Literature, it is argued, are symptomatic of profound changes in cultural technology that require literary studies to rethink language as precisely a writer’s and a reader’s “capital”, and to revisit the oikonomia of language as the place of world-modelling and world-making.

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Cover Neohelicon
Neohelicon
Print ISSN:
0324-4652
Online ISSN:
1588-2810

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Neohelicon
Language English
Size B5
Year of
Foundation		 1973
Volumes
per Year		 1
Issues
per Year		 2
Founder Akadémiai Kiadó
Founder's
Address		 H-1117 Budapest, Hungary 1516 Budapest, PO Box 245.
Publisher Akadémiai Kiadó
Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Publisher's
Address		 H-1117 Budapest, Hungary 1516 Budapest, PO Box 245.
CH-6330 Cham, Switzerland Gewerbestrasse 11.
Responsible
Publisher		 Chief Executive Officer, Akadémiai Kiadó
ISSN 0324-4652 (Print)
ISSN 1588-2810 (Online)

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