mere "political correctness," the choice of an acceptable minority author to salve the conscience of the dominant culture.10 Earlier negative assessments pointing to Morrison's supposed "trademark excesses" in violence, racist sentiment, and prose style arose anew.11 Some critics simply did not consider that Morrison deserved the rank of "world-class novelist" and regretted that finer novelists remained "unawarded."12 Indeed, in his detailed book commissioned by the Swedish Academy, Kjell Espmark documents the way the post-World War II choices for Nobel laureates tended to favor the universally recognized "experimenters" such as T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett who had brought "vital renewal" to literature, but that by the 70s, "functional and pragmatic viewpoints" took on more importance.13 Now the prize was not meant to be mere decoration, but rather should prove useful, lending support to a developing author, a neglected literary genre, or an "insufficiently recognized linguistic or cultural sphere" (92) as part of the Academy's attempt to address the prize to "the literature of the whole world."14 Despite the risk involved in selecting younger writers, the Academy saw its investment in rising authors, frequently from marginal groups, as part of its attempt to broaden its horizons and influence. The selection of an African-American woman was thus not incidental, but to view Morrison's selection as "patroniz[ing] by race", a mere "gesture of Social Significance" shows deep ignorance of the merits of Morrison's oeuvre. 15 ...
