2:30 p.m., Nov. 10, 2010----The University of Delaware's annual symposium explaining the work done by the most recent Nobel Prize-winners, which began Oct. 29 with talks by four speakers, continued on Nov. 5 with discussions of the prizes awarded for literature, peace and economics.

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The literature talk was delivered by Angel Esteban, a visiting professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, who personally knows the 2010 Nobel laureate for literature, Mario Vargas Llosa, and has written two books about him. Esteban told the audience that “not only is he a good friend of mine but he is also one of the best authors in the Spanish language alive today.”

Vargas Llosa's dedication to literature began at a young age, Esteban said, and became even stronger when his father sent him to a military school where he was discouraged from writing. From then on, Vargas Llosa's work was marked by his own feelings of rebellion, and his novels often focused on issues of authoritarianism, dictatorship, corruption and power, Esteban said.

“As soon as he wrote his first novel, he knew that was the only thing he was going to do with his life,” he said.

Esteban's talk also included the reading of excerpts from Vargas Llosa's work, including one from Letters to a Young Novelist, in which he speaks about his discovery of his own literary vocation and his fight to follow that vocation. “Deep inside, a writer feels that writing is the best thing that ever happened to him -- or could happen to him,” he wrote.

Jianguo Chen, associate professor of foreign languages and literatures, spoke about Nobel Peace Prize-winner Liu Xiaobo, a nonviolent activist for human rights in China, and the controversy that often is associated with the choice of the Peace Prize winner. Liu is serving a prison sentence in China for his anti-government activities.

“The Nobel Peace Prize is one of the most prestigious awards but also one of the most contentious,” Chen said. “This year's choice is creating all kinds of drama.”

He called the selection of Liu “a puzzling choice” because other dissidents are seen as having more influence and because some human rights activists have questioned Liu's past activities. Chen added that the selection has given ammunition to hard-liners in the Chinese government, who have protested the decision to honor a person they term “an imprisoned criminal.”

Liu became known as a scholar at a young age, Chen said, and was jailed several times for his advocacy of human rights and an end to Communist Party rule. In late 2008, just before his most recent arrest, he published what the West views as a manifesto for human rights, calling for such initiatives as freedom of assembly and expression, a separation of powers and an independent judiciary.

The final lecture in the symposium concerned the work by Peter A. Diamond, Dale T. Mortensen and Christopher A. Pissarides, who jointly won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Saul Hoffman, professor and chairperson of UD's Department of Economics, discussed their “analysis of markets with search frictions,” which explains why job vacancies can be difficult to fill even at times of high unemployment.

In the United States during usual economic times, Hoffman said, the labor market experiences a great deal of movement. Workers frequently change jobs and as a result may be unemployed for a short time while they search for and find a new position. In Europe, he said, the labor market shows much less movement, and unemployment there is typically long-term, not short-term.

A simple supply-and-demand model doesn't explain the labor market, Hoffman said, because “workers and jobs are infinitely heterogeneous,” making it difficult to match a potential employee with a particular job vacancy. “You can have unemployed workers at the same time you have unfilled jobs, if these people cannot locate each other,” he said.

The economics laureates devised a way to explain that situation and “came up with a complex model that's now the standard in looking at labor markets,” Hoffman said.

The first session of the two-part Nobel Symposium, organized each year by the College of Arts and Sciences, featured discussions of the prizes awarded this year in physiology or medicine, physics and chemistry, as well as the Abel Medal in Mathematics, an award similar in stature to the Nobel. One of the laureates this year in chemistry was Richard F. Heck, who is the Willis F. Harrington Professor Emeritus of chemistry and biochemistry at UD.

Article by Ann Manser
Photo by Kathy Atkinson