So now that the Nobel Prize in Literature is gone—the 2018 prize will be postponed（postpone vt.使延期，延缓，把... ...放在次要地位，把……放在后面），as the Swedish Academy deals with the fallout（n.余波;放射尘:（核爆炸后的）沉降 物;附带后果）of a sexual harassment scan-dal一it seems worth asking what, exactly, the prize gives us. Will we miss it this October, when the chemists and physicists and economists are buzzing about their laureates? Some people will, surely一the publishers who capitalize on the prize to sell the winners foreign rights, and the journalists for whom it provides an annual headline, must be furious.

This is not just because American readers are resistant to fiction in translation, as publishers often complain. On the contrary, over the last two decades, many foreign writers have made a major impact on American literature. Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Haruki Murakami have all been celebrated here and around the world； none has won the Nobel Prize. But then, the failure of the Swedish Academy to reflect the actual judgment of literary history is nothing new. K you drew a Venn diagram showing the winners of the Nobel Prize in one circle and the most influential and widely read 20th-century writers in the other, their area of overlap（n.叠部分;覆盖物）would be surprisingly small. The Nobel managed to miss most of the modem writers who matter.

Does this mean that the Swedish Academy has been particularly incompetent（adj.无能力的;不胜任的:不适当的）in administering the prize? Would a different group of critics and professors in a bigger, more cosmopolitan（adj.四海为家的;世界性的）country have done a better job at picking the winners? Very possibly；and one salutary side effect of the cancellation is to draw attention to the Academy itself. Like every literary prize, but even more so, the Nobel’s prestige requires that we not pay too much attention to the judges who award it. In the mind of the general public, the Nobel basically descends from the sky to anoint the winner. But it is nothing more or less than the decision of a particular group of readers, with their own strengths and weaknesses.

Literature is at least produced by individual authors; but in this case, the Nobel's reliance on ostensibly expert judgment runs into a different problem. For literature is not addressed to an audience of experts; it is open to the judgment of every reader. Nor is literature progressive, with new discoveries superseding old ones ： Homer is just as groundbreaking today as be was 2,500 years ago. This makes it impossible to rank literary works according to an objective standard of superiority. Different people will find inspiration and sustenance in different books, because literature is as irreducibly（adv.不能减少地，不能简化地）pluralistic（adj.兼职的.多元论的.多元化的）as human beings themselves.

Good criticism helps people to find the books that will speak to them, but it doesn't attempt lo simply name” the most outstanding work" in the way the Nobel Prize does. It is impossible lo name the single best writer for the same reason that you can't speak of the single best human being： there are too many different criteria（n.标准，准则）for judgment（n.判断,鉴定，辨别力,判断力）A book earns the status of a classic, not because it is approved by a committee or put on a syllabus（n.教学大纲，课程提纲）, but simply because a lot of people like it for a long time.

Of course, the Nobel Prize will be back in 2019—it serves the interest of too many people to be permanently canceled. But this October will be a good time to celebrate its absence（n.缺席,缺勤;缺乏.缺少） by remembering that, in the words of the great l8th-century critic Samuel Johnson, "by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices（prejudice n.侵害;成见,偏见;歧视）... finally decided all claim to poetical honors.