"Contested experts"

Contested Experts: The performing of aesthetic judgment in contemporary Scandinavia (CONTEXT)

FRIPRO project proposition

 “The time has passed for anyone to tell others what is good and bad culture or cultural taste”. This statement was made on Twitter by the Norwegian Minister of Culture in 2016, Linda Hofstad Helleland (Conservative Party). She tweeted in response to one theatre reviewer’s somewhat negative assessment of the traditional Saint Olav Drama, a hugely popular historical drama production. At face value, Helleland mobilizes concepts of democracy, claiming that every citizen has the right to define what is of value to him- or herself, and that the power to judge does not reside with the representatives of high culture or with any type of aesthetic expert. The CONTEXT project wants to find out if claims like the one made by Helleland support democracy, or if they rather need to be seen as threats to the foundation of it; the public spheres as a space for debate based on informed argumentation. CONTEXT studies the current situation of experts and how they act and are perceived in Scandinavia today. Our material include debates in different fora for criticism, interviews with literary experts and contemporary fiction as well as responses to it.

The principal investigator of the project is professor Christine Hamm, a scholar of literary criticism and gender studies. She will closely collaborate with experts on literary criticism (E. Vassenden, Nilsson) and established sociologists of culture (Skarpenes, Jonvik, Larsen, A. Vassenden). While earlier research has studied the role of judgements of taste in social life mainly as part of a system of hierarchically ordered distinctions, CONTEXT takes a pragmatic approach that combines rhetorical reading, ethnography and speech-act analysis. Our aim is to find out if the opposition between elites and non-elites that show up in aesthetic judgments and the debates about them is real or imaginary, and to develop tools for critics and other experts to deal with the increasing hostility they are facing when giving expression to their views.

1.Excellence

1. State of the art, knowledge needs and project objectives

A number of studies have documented or claimed a fundamental ”crisis in criticism” in a changed medial situation – and a changed climate towards the very notion of a public sphere (Elkins 2003, McDonald 2007). Other studies have shown the same tendency, not the least Skarpenes, Sakslind and Hestholm’s studies (Skarpenes 2007, Sakslind et al. 2018) of the taste of the Norwegian highly educated middle class – where findings indicate that both traditional markers of “high taste”, but also the legitimacy of critics acting on its behalf, were seen as highly problematic by a majority of the interviewees. Often the bare mentioning or mere thought of the critic – any critic passing judgment over a work of art – would be enough to draw hostility, or make informants uncomfortable or judgmental.

Opposed to the notion of an omnivoral, “classless” cultural climate (Verboord 2010), wherein everyone is free to consume whatever they like (and without consequences, e.g. Peterson and Simkus 1992), we find overwhelming evidence of the continued existence of distinct hierarchies and differentiations. Such evidence pertains to empirical documentation of class-based taste profiles (e.g. Flemmen et al. 2018), to that elites enjoy popular culture in different ways from non-elites (Holt 1997), and to experience. In regards to experience, works of fiction present narrations of distinct social groups that are marked by their tastes, whereof only some groups include people acting as experts (Lundberg 2009, Dale 2016). In public debates, moreover, we find tendencies that discussants evoke images of distinctions between “experts” and “ordinary people”.

The first set of questions one would need to know the answer to, is then the following:

• Given the situation in Contemporary Scandinavia, is the cultural expert contested or not? If yes, when is (s)he contested, and how, and where?

With the emerging of new media and a number of new possibilities for participation, the space for public discussions of taste arguably has become more democratic – but also more instable and open for influence from commercial and political interests. Firstly, the influence of the critic is challenged by commercialized digital algorithms tailoring cultural offerings to individual tastes. Secondly, ever more polarized public spheres are seeing the growth of a certain anti-elitism rhetoric that challenges the legitimacy of expertise as such and the status of the cultural expert in particular. 

The authority of the critic has of cause been contested at least since the 19^th century. Aesthetic judgments and the authority of the critic have been harshly discussed as part of historical revolts and reforms, also because elites held monopoly on public debate, excluding social groups from participation and full citizenship (for instance, women and the working class). In David Hume’s seminal essay on aesthetic judgments and “The Standard of Taste” (1757), for instance, the expert is explicitly inscribed as the personification of cultural authority: The expert is a (white, male and educated) person who has refined his taste by training and education. Claims to any absolute objectivity in this process of aesthetic assessment, have long since been undone by arguments that judgments of taste are never neutral, and that the dominant cultural authority traditionally also is classed and gendered in specific ways (Mattick 1990, Klinger 1998, Hamm 2013).

As a reaction to this, few, if any, representatives of intellectuals or elites will refer to taste differences explicitly or in the public – at least not in egalitarian Scandinavia (and beyond; cf. Kuipers 2013). In truth, extremely few will even admit publicly to being part of a cultural elite (Krogstad 2019). Expressing cultural distinctions, in short, is wedded with moral concerns, with a ‘”moral-egalitarian’” repertoire of evaluation’ (Skarpenes and Sakslind 2010). This is not to say that cultural hierarchies become obsolete and inconsequential; on the contrary, egalitarian morality may simply hide them from view (Vassenden and Jonvik 2019). As we have witnessed – cf. the former minister of culture – the symbolic associations of taste and class nevertheless govern both the public arguments, possibly with outcomes for cultural policy. Some of the findings of Skarpenes et al. suggest that a large number of middle class informants found categorical aesthetic judgments to be morally offensive. CONTEXT seeks to study whether there is a general tendency in debates on taste to ascribe the cultural expert an agency of moral – as well as aesthetic – superiority.

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The second set of questions pointing to knowledge gaps looks like this:

• Should we see contestations to the cultural expert’s authority still as a democratic impulse? How do experts themselves deal with the hostility they face? What is at stake when cultural expertise is undermined?

These are the most pressing questions to pose in the academic quest for a better grasp of the contemporary discussions of cultural expertise, aesthetic judgment and taste. They are also key for understanding the inner workings of the new medial and less hierarchically structured public spheres. The concept of cultural expertise thus points towards both the institutionalized roles of critic and taste-expert, and the fact that what is at stake here, is a power of definition that can apply to both social, cultural and technological contexts.

1. Novelty and ambition         

For the first time in Scandinavia, CONTEXT combines efforts by sociologists of culture with those of scholars of literature when studying experts on art and aesthetic judgments. The collaboration across the disciplines will extend their range: When combined with the perspectives of sociology, literary criticism will be revealed as influencing, and be influenced by, social life. On the other side, sociologists will gain new insights into social processes by using methods developed in literary criticism such as rhetorical analyses of the investigation of speech acts.

Whereas literary scholars have often focused solely on the role of the critic and his or her criteria for cultural value (Andersen 1987, Bjerck Hagen 2003, Forser 2004) and sociology has studied cultural practices in terms of social differentiation (Bourdieu 1979), CONTEXT bridges the gap between the two disciplines’ focus. CONTEXT sees cultural expertise neither as a component in a fixed social structure nor as an institution or as individual, literary testimonies of social stratification. We see the negotiation of cultural expertise as a complex interplay of taste, social, medial, technological and aesthetic practices. The status of cultural and aesthetic expertise and how it is contested can only be studied satisfactorily through cross-disciplinary analyses of a heterogeneous material, ranging from policy documents governing the field of culture, via contemporary public debates on literature and art in both traditional and new media, interviews and fieldwork with cultural experts, to works of fiction and responses to them.

Our overall ambition, however, is not only to give a clear overview of the current situation of cultural experts position in Scandinavia. We also seek to develop tools that can help experts such as book reviewers, academics and teachers to deal with the increasing hostility towards them. Since the situation we expect to find is highly complex, the risk we are running is more than obvious. The effort to include an analysis of the impact of the changed media habits on the various types of cultural criticism (printed press, online-based, social media-based), and on the attitudes towards of the cultural expert as such, may be too ambitious. We might not find the situation sufficiently clear to understand, and therefore we might not be able to develop tools that would enable experts to handle it. However, also an eventual failure would hopefully be illuminating and engage colleagues to further researcher.

1. Research questions and hypotheses, theoretical approach and methodology

The CONTEXT project seeks to identify if, when, how and why cultural expertise is contested. We analyse the performing of aesthetic judgments – and responses to them – in i) contemporary public debates on literature, across different media and platforms, ii) in interviews with cultural experts (mainly critics) that focus on their navigation of various social contexts (private face-to-face, digital/semi-public, public) and iii) in works of fiction and readers’ responses to them. Looking at this material, we ask the following research questions:

• How is cultural expertise exercised, appealed to and legitimized?
• How is cultural expertise opposed and rejected?
• Does accept, rejection and negotiation of cultural authority relate to the construction and maintenance of social hierarchies and class identities in self-proclaimed egalitarian Scandinavia? If so, how?
• What are the possible moral issues that emerge in – and potentially shape – debates on taste and the performing of aesthetic judgments?  

Our hypothesis is that the hostility towards the literary critic and other cultural experts hide projected images of “expert opinion” – we call this the phantom expert – which dominate public discourses on taste, at the same time as images of “popular tastes” are produced. The images of “phantom experts” are mirrored in images of the “phantom people”, in a binary structure that can in itself produce a polarized depiction of both taste and taste preferences. As we see it right now, this polarization is in itself rather a threat to democracy than supporting it.

Theoretically, the project challenges the status of Pierre Bourdieu’s pathbreaking study of taste distinctions and class (2010 [1979]). In sociology, there is widespread agreement that taste is linked to socio-cultural background (Flemmen et al. 2018). An important polarity to Bourdieu is the one between cultural and economic capital, and thus cultural and an economic elites. Taste profiles are found to correspond with different (segments of) socioeconomic positions, e.g. the intellectuals who appreciate “high culture” (also identified as the “legitimate culture”), and the working class, who appreciates popular culture and at the same time shies away from high culture. In Bourdieusian analyses, taste and distinction are acts of symbolic violence.

In the Scandinavian countries, several studies argue, the way cultural expertise is expressed differs from how it is implemented in Bourdieu’s France (e.g. Skarpenes 2007). For instance, deep-rooted egalitarian ideology complicates the way judgments of taste are navigated in social encounters in Norway (Vassenden and Jonvik 2019). However, the significance of Bourdieusian analysis has been upheld against these objections, claiming that the self-proclaimed Scandinavian egalitarianism can be said to function as a cloak for the symbolic power that comes along with the distinctions (Hjellbrekke et al 2017).

Rather than to defend Bourdieu and his general theory of distinctions, we want to reflect theoretically in close interaction with particular cases. Therefore, the three work packages will methodologically differ according to the material and data that will be studied and the specific questions that are asked. CONTEXT1 is a collaboration between sociologists and literary critics, and will combine the analysis of institutions with a rhetorical approach to a material ranging from political and public debate to material collected from social media. CONTEXT2 takes a qualitative sociological approach using interviews, written data and both traditional and digital ethnography. CONTEXT3 is a literary part of the project that will be driven by a pragmatic approach inspired by the procedures of ordinary language philosophy.

We build on new research on book reviewing (Furuseth, Thon and Vassenden 2016), Scandinavian working class literature (Hamm 2017, Nilsson 2018), institutionalized cultural legitimacy (Larsen 2016), and culture and social class (Vassenden and Jonvik 2019; Skarpenes and Sakslind 2010). The explicit aim of the theory work in CONTEXT, however, is to prepare the ground for a methodological approach to the analysis of the discussion of aesthetic judgment which could combine 1) the specific insights from literary studies on the tone, style and criterion – the rhetoric – of the articulated judgment with 2) an analysis of the significance of social hierarchies that cultural sociology provides and 3) an awareness and understanding of the role various technologies plays in both the passing, the distribution and the discussion of aesthetic judgment.

Needless to mention that an analysis of the status of the expert calls for a certain awareness of perspective bias: Arguably, current theory work on the questions of taste and cultural expertise is biased towards the expert’s point of view. One urgent question to ask will be: How can we ourselves overcome the tendency to polarize when analysing criticism, its response and the negotiation of cultural expertise?

2.Impact

2.1.Potential impact of the proposed research

CONTEXT will offer a more precise mapping of polarization in public discussions of aesthetic quality and taste, and the findings from the project will make it possible to find new ways of navigating complex cultural landscapes. More specifically, we aim at rendering groups of experts such as book reviewers, academics and teachers, a set of tools which would enable them to handle the hostility which they have to face. We hope for an improved understanding of how trust is currently produced and distributed in the field of culture and with regard to cultural criticism – and a more detailed insight into how different modes and platforms of debate produce different opinions of cultural expertise

Findings from CONTEXT will benefit journalists, critics, teachers and writers and others who need to be aware of the mechanisms that produce judgments of taste, and the social structures that can be produced by the exercise of cultural expertise. CONTEXT’s ambition to map situations where cultural authority and moral judgments and constraints intersect, should produce insights that will help understand how judgments of taste can be made visible as a topic for discussion, rather than as an unconscious part of the (expression of) judgments themselves. Furthermore, we want to challenge traditional conceptions of relations between social class and cultural authority, and thus participate in a relaxation of ongoing polarizations. CONTEXT will thereby widen our understanding of both the mechanisms of social and medial production of cultural differences – and the mechanisms of cultural and medial production of social difference? We believe one outcome of CONTEXT will be insights that will help users of cultural criticism to navigate a new medial landscape. This supports the United Nations’ 9^th sustainability goal, in strengthening “resilient infrastructures” and “innovation” by providing tools to counteract polarization.

The findings from the methodological and theoretical parts of CONTEXT will expand the fields of both literary and cultural sociology, making way for future research in the relation between literary descriptions and sociological findings, making works of fiction and the institution of aesthetic judgement a material for sociological research into the way fiction can be seen as a field of practice in its own right. On the other hand, the theory development from CONTEXT will give literary scholars a widened understanding of and sharper tools to analyse the correspondences between sociology and literature, and of the role the exercising of cultural authority plays not only in the literary institution, but also within works of fiction – and the interpretation and judgment of it. Part of what CONTEXT offers to other researchers, book-reviewers and the public is:

• An overview of the current situation of cultural experts, exemplified by the performing of literary expertise (including a diagnosis of when and why critics are contested)
• A map of how digital technologies – both in forms of peer-produced response and algorithms – are integral parts of our decision-making in aesthetic matters.
• A diagnosis of what resistance to cultural expertise (in form of literary scholars) looks like and where it might come from
• A reflection of how an awareness of the problematic role of the expert could and should influence the enacting of cultural authority in newspapers, social media, works of fiction and at schools

            2.2.Measures for communication and exploitation

The CONTEXT project will communicate closely with the same public spheres that the project seeks to research, and we will consider public debate on the project’s finding to be a valuable part of the CONTEXT’s intention to create awareness of and discussion about the significance of cultural criticism. To reach our goals of public attention, the project group will have to cooperate closely with groups that will benefit from the activities and findings in the project: Other researchers (both in literary studies and in the field of sociology), students, book reviewers, journalists specialized on art, art criticism and technology, school teachers and professional writers. The interaction with these groups will necessarily take different forms, but collaborations will find place throughout the entire project period, at places such as the Literary House at Bergen, the Students’ union, Public libraries, schools and gatherings at the Critics’ union.

We envision our activities to be channelled through both academic and popular outlets, through academic and popular publications such as articles in high-ranking and open access publications as well as chronicles in local newspapers, through a number of seminars and conferences, through specially edited sections of academic journals and anthologies, and through research-driven courses focusing on student research (see list on p. 9 for details. Furthermore, the project will formalize a partnership with the Norwegian Critics’ Association (cooperation on recruiting informants for CONTEXT2 and on a seminar on criticism in the 21^st century) and a select group of teachers in Norwegian secondary and upper secondary school.

3.Implementation

1. Project manager and project group

Professor of Scandinavian literature, Christine Hamm, will be the principal investigator in the project.  Being an expert of Norwegian women writers, she has participated in NRC-funded projects such as “The notion of the Body: Construction of gender in Norwegian literature (2002-2006)” and “Conflict and negotiations: Gender and aesthetic value” (2008-2012). She has been responsible for a number of conferences and seminars, and is currently the leader of the research group on Scandinavian literature at UiB. Hamm is also a dedicated member of the Scandinavian network on working class literature, and has ongoing contact with researchers inspired by Ordinary language philosophy in many different countries. She has published two monographs and edited 5 anthologies, as well as been co-editor for the international journal Edda. Scandinavian Journal of Literary Research (2010–2015). Hamm teaches regularly courses in literary criticism, such as gender and aesthetics or ordinary language philosophy for literary critics, and is experienced in supervising masterstudents and PhD-candidates.

The advisory board will function as a group, commenting on the project in person twice (during the Kick-off workshop in 2020 and the international conference in 2023, see chart below). The CONTEXT project group will further benefit from the collaboration with the Nordic network on working class literature (www.nordarb.mau.se), with the Digital Humanities Network at the University of Bergen (https://www.uib.no/en/digitalhumanities) and with the SCANPUB network at the University of Bergen (https://scanpub.w.uib.no).

3.2. Project organisation and management

The project has three work packages, which concentrate on three corresponding areas:

CONTEXT1: The public exercise of cultural expertise in a new medial situation

Professors Eirik Vassenden and Håkon Larsen will be working on this part of the project. They will collaborate with 10 student researchers and 2 research assistants. Throughout their research, Vassenden and Larsen will have contact with two members of the advisory board: Professor Anne Krogstad from Oslo and Assistant professor Marc Verboord from Rotterdam.

The work package CONTEXT1 will focus on and map recent transformations of the public spheres. Traditional theory of the public sphere (Habermas 1971[1962], Sennett 1977) has tended to see the development of the public sphere within a narrative of decay: Since the middle of the 19^th century, the critic’s status has gradually waned, corresponding with both commercial, institutional and technological changes in the medial structures. However, this traditional and rather pessimistic view can be seen as outdated, and is challenged by a number of theorists, among them Mouffe and Laclau (1985). With their model of agonistic democracy they see public spheres as a place that needs to be capable of maintaining differences of interest and opinion, and where opposition and open differences of agency is considered an integral and necessary part of the public exchange. In a study of the public status of expert culture, criticism and aesthetic judgment, we need a model that both accounts for and recognizes the necessity of difference and disagreement.

CONTEXT 1 will establish an overarching theoretical perspective of the late modern public sphere, combining media theory, theories of public spheres, cultural sociology and theory of criticism and reviewing. We will develop new tools to understand the convergences of new class and taste distinctions in a situation labelled as a “polarized” and technologically composite public sphere. The notion of polarization applies to both the existence of old hegemonic (vertical) structures and distinctions, and emerging new (horizontal) structures of redistributed taste distinctions.

Material to be analysed in CONTEXT1 falls into four categories, and will be studied in a Scandinavian context, with a main focus on Norway:

1. Policy documents and whitepapers governing the institutionalized practices of aesthetic judgment
2. Critics’ production – reviews, participation in public debates. We ask: how do critics construct their audience, images of the public?
3. Public response to reviews – in the field of literatur and art, in both traditional and new/social media
4. Public response to and public debates on art in public spaces, in both traditional and new/social media 

The methodological approach will mainly be rhetorical analysis across the four levels of material. The analysis of policy papers is conceived as a discussion of how cultural expertise is governed on an institutional level. Primary focus will be given to levels 2 and 3 and the exchange between them. Here we seek to carry out a thorough and multi-layered analysis of both the way cultural expertise is staged and used in critics’ production, and how it is received, discussed and – often – dismissed or challenged by readers. Here we will map and analyse differences between critics in traditional media, critics in alternative media and peer-produced criticism with particular regard to how images of the expert and the public are constructed. Building on both traditional reception studies and on methods for extracting data from social media (e.g. Enli and Moe 2015), a goal for this part of the analysis is to understand how new technologies change the way we perceive and discuss cultural expertise.

CONTEXT2: How cultural experts navigate different social and technological situations

Principal investigator in CONTEXT2 will be Professor Anders Vassenden, who collaborates with one of the post-doctoral researchers, Merete Jonvik and Ove Skarpenes, and who will stay in contact with advisory board member Professor Gisela Kuipers from Amsterdam.

CONTEXT2 engages with management and performance of cultural expertise, in everyday life and the public spheres. It draws on the theories of Bourdieu ([1979]2010) and Goffman (1959; 1963), with special attention to issues of morality and social encounters. For data, we shall conduct ethnography and (repeated) qualitative interviews with altogether 20 participants. Participants shall be critics within arts and literature, curators, and university professors in arts and literature. We will also rely on written material from the same people (and others), pertaining to social media discussions and published reviews. We are particularly interested in whether and how cultural experts relate to images such as “phantom expert” and “phantom people”, and how these images inform their ‘presenta­tion of self in everyday life’ (Goffman 1959) and their professional work. We envision that an in-depth enquiry into the lives of the critics – as emblematic “cultural experts” – will yield novel insights about the societal position of cultural authority, and how this is currently changing.

CONTEXT2 poses the question of what the consequences are, of the two “phantom” images (“expert” and “people”) for (i) the exercise of aesthetic judgment, (ii) display of cultural expertise, and (iii) whether and how the latter is dependent on interaction contexts. In regards to interaction contexts, our preliminary analytical dimensions are public/private; technological/face-to-face; inter-/intra-group.

In order to answer these questions, we will excavate how the critic (and curators and professors) navigate public contexts, semi-public contexts (digital media) and contexts of everyday face-to-face interaction. Several studies show that Norwegian cultural elites tend to downplay their status (e.g. Ljungren 2017), especially when in the company of ‘ordinary people’. Still, we know very little about how experience and display of cultural expertise vary between contexts where such expertise is centre-stage, or when the critic is literally on stage, such as at a literature festival – contra contexts where interactants have unequal cultural resources (or where the expert suspects that to be the case).

It will be key to CONTEXT2 to identify apt interaction contexts. Since public contexts are more accessible than private ones, we will begin the data production at key literature festivals and arts biennials in Norway. Here, we will ‘shadow’ critics, and interview them about how their role as a cultural expert. Moreover, we intend to elicit the cultural repertoires they invoke in such intra-groups settings contra the repertoires they rely on in in the company of non-experts. In addition to shadowing the ca. 20 people through ethnography at festivals and biennials, we plan to interview each one on several occasions. These follow-up interviews will be done in response to reviews they publish, and to discussions they have on social media. Regarding the latter, we aim to follow the same people by way of digital ethnography. Follow-up interviews will centre on scenarios for inter-class encounters (which are difficult to forecast and cover through ethnography).

CONTEXT3: Experts on taste in Contemporary Scandinavian fiction

Researchers in CONTEXT3 will be Professor Christine Hamm and Magnus Nilsson, as well as one of the postdoctoral research fellows and student researchers. Principal investigator Christine Hamm will also be responsible for the reader-research, where she will benefit from close collaboration with one of the world-leading experts on the field, advisory board member Professor Janice Radway from Chicago.

This part of the project focuses on experts on taste as they show up in contemporary Scandinavian prose fiction as well as readers’ responses to it. Central questions to be dealt with are the following:

• How are experts on taste described in novels and short stories?
• What is their role in the plot, what objects are they concerned with?
• Can the judgments of taste that these experts realize, be understandable on the background of their situation in social life?
• What status do the experts in fiction have in real life? Do they support images of phantom experts?
• How do different groups of readers react to the judgments of taste that are described in fiction?

In earlier research on the role of the relation between taste and class in literary texts, academic scholars have taken leave in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. However, problems can arise due to Bourdieu’s understanding of how the production of aesthetic value is produced. Coming from a structuralist theory that proclaims the arbitrarity of signs, Bourdieu thinks that cultural artefacts are given value through economic forces. From the perspective of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1967 [1958]) and Stanley Cavell (1969), however, one could argue that the meaning of cultural artefacts is nowhere else to localize than in the way these artefacts are produced and matter in specific forms of life (Mangrum 2015).

As an alternative to the chase for class markers, we rather want to study the judgments of taste as they turn up in literary texts as cases of speech acts as we understand them in the tradition after J.L. Austin (1962). Since we think that judgments of taste are part of a specific form of life, we want to pay special attention to the contrast of what we want to call texts with a middleclass-perspective to texts which we would characterize as working-class literature. Specifically, we want to study works of Scandinavian authors with a middleclass-perspective such as Vigdis Hjorth’s Hjulskift (2007), Kyrre Andreassen’s Svendsens catering (2006) and Herman Bang Foss (Døden kører audi, 2012), but also works by working-class authors such as Jan Kristoffer Dale (Arbeidsnever, 2016), Elise Karlsson (Gränsen, 2018), Susanna Alakoski (Svinalängorna, 2006), Torbjörn Flygt (Underdog, 2001), Kristian Lundberg (Yarden, 2009) and Mats Källblad (Hundra år i same klass). CONTEXT3 produces presentations and readings of literature devoted to different aspects of experts in action as they are described in texts of fiction.

In addition, we want to comment on how literary experts as well as different groups of readers have characterized novels and short stories focusing on experts of taste. We ask:

• How has the focus on working class background of the protagonists such as those described by Alakoski influenced critics’ judgments of taste?
• Would this have been different, if Alakoski would have been an author which grew up in the middleclass? 

The readers to be interviewed will be collected among i) women’s reading groups, ii) students at the Department of linguistic, literary and aesthetic studies (LLE/UiB) and iii) a group of pupils at Bergen katedralskole.

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