Talent and taste and murder : A study from a sociology of literature perspective of the Nobel Prize and highbrow culture in Karin Alvtegen’s Skugga

This master thesis deals with the Nobel Prize and highbrow culture as portrayed in Karin Alvtegen’s Skugga. From a sociology of literature perspective, it aims to analyze how these highbrow themes can be understood in relation to Alvtegen’s position in the literary field as a lowbrow crime novelist. The method used is hermeneutic, and the analysis is based on two theoretical models: Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural sociology, and the postmodern tradition where the distinction high/low and its traditional hierarchy is said to be decomposed. The analysis shows how Alvtegen gets inscribed in a detective genre she doesn’t really fit into, which is of great importance for our understanding and reading of Skugga. In relation to the history of the detective genre, this essay explains how Alvtegen uses both the whodunit’s integrating of highbrow symbols, as well as the social critique frequently used in more recent crime fiction. The conclusions drawn are that Alvtegen’s use of highbrow symbols illustrates the literary field, while they also discuss her own position on the very same field – text and context here operates closely intertwined. The highbrow theme in Skugga functions as both a dissociation from as well as a rapprochement to highbrow culture, while it also criticizes a contemporary commercialized culture. The Nobel Prize here plays a significant role, as it has become a highbrow symbol known to everybody. Skugga illustrates that intertextual markers in our contemporary post-modern culture is transformed in both directions in the cultural hierarchy – which doesn’t mean that it has vanished