Please join the department of English and Creative Writing for a talk with Günter Leypoldt. Leypoldt's book Literature’s Social Lives: A Socio-institutional History of Literary Value proposes a new value theory and sketches a socio-institutional history of US and (mostly) Anglophone literary culture from the 1800s to the present. It situates itself within an emerging field of a sociologically attuned literary criticism, which combines ethnographic interest in the aesthetics of literary experience with a curiosity about how literature gains cultural relevance and institutional authority. The largest thesis is that the ever-rising turnover of books between 1800 and 2000 expanded the commercial literary marketplace, yet, by inverse subsidy, also stabilized literature’s market-sheltered support systems. Today’s literary culture seems beset not just by market bottom lines but also by scholastic corps effects emerging from writers’ and readers’ investments in academically shaped economies of prestige.

Günter Leypoldt is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Heidelberg, and founding member of the Research Training Group "Authority and Trust in the US." Previously he taught at the universities of Mainz and Tübingen, and held visiting appointments at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology, Dartmouth College, and the ENS Lyon. His essays appeared in such journals as American Literary History, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, New Literary History, Poetics, Modern Language Quarterly, Critical Quarterly, Contemporary Literature, and Post45.