Churchill, Bergson, Russell

 I was idly speculating about the Nobel prize, to be announced tomorrow. I was thinking that some people who are not primarily littérateurs have won it, most notably Winston Churchill, Henri Bergson, or Bertrand Russell. The puts Dylan's prize from a few years back in a different light, I think. Maybe literature is not even a category with any firm boundaries, or rather, a category with shifting outer boundaries. We know the central core is works of imaginative literature like poems, plays, and novels that are susceptible to enjoying cultural prestige. At the outer edge are ways of thinking in and through language that don't look like what's found in a novel or a play. 

I asked my undergraduate students what a play without a conflict would be, and one student said, "a podcast." That was a pretty good answer.