Previous Winners
2009 MSA Book Prize
William Chapman Sharpe, New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography (Princeton University Press)
William Sharpe states that the “first dark glimmer” inspiring his book came while looking at one of James McNeill Whistlers’ “Nocturnes.” But to paraphrase Djuna Barnes, who provides the epigraph to the book, “The nights of one city are not the nights of another.” Sharpe’s New York Nocturne is a masterful story of this most extravagantly glittering of night-time cityscapes as portrayed by writers and artists across the late 19th and 20th centuries, a city that appears less and less like one of Whistler’s “moonlights,” but instead, as Le Corbusier described it, “a Milky Way
come down to earth.” We have long been accustomed to thinking of art as bringing
light to the world: considering that proposition from the other side, this book offers
a stimulating account of the dynamic relations among technology and painting, photography and literature.
Honorable Mention:
Ron Schuchard, The Last Minstrel: Yeats & The Revival of the Bardic Arts (Oxford UP)
Short List (in alphabetical order):
Dianne Sachko MacLeod, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture 1800-1940 (Univ. of Cal Press)
Dana Seitler, Atavistic Tendencies: The Culture of Science in American Modernity (Minnesota Univ. Press)
Lesley Wheeler, Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present (Cornell Univ. Press)
MSA Prize Committee:
Michael Coyle, Colgate University (Chair)
John Xiros Cooper, University of British Columbia
Deborah Longworth, University of Birmingham
2008 MSA Book Prize
The 2008 MSA book prize was awarded to volumes 1 and 2 of modernism (John Benjamins Publishing Co, 2007), edited by Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, a project first set in motion in the 1980s. The editors explain in their introduction that, between the time the book was first proposed to the International Comparative Literature Association and the time they undertook the work again, the developments in modernist studies required them to reconceptualise the intent and scope of the volumes. One of those developments, as they point out, was the founding 10 years ago of the Modernist Studies Association, the first conference of which was titled-daringly-the New Modernisms. It is a happy coincidence, though not an accident, that MSA’s 10th anniversary and the appearance of these volumes should dovetail in this way.
The ambition of the editors is to capture, in their words, “the ways modernism is viewed at the beginning of the twentieth-century.” Thus the essays collected in Volume 1 range over approaches via critical theory, technology and science, time and space, mind and body, and literature and the other arts. Volume 2 considers social and political parameters (such as racial politics and ecological criticism) and concepts of the sacred, of popular culture, and of diaspora and exile. The volume concludes with a section entitled ‘case studies’ that considers the modernisms of Brazil, Australia, Catalonia, France, Spain, Russia, Italy, Greece, and the Nordic countries.
This monumental project is, in significant and heartening ways, a physical manifestation of the aspirations of the MSA-to consider modernisms as an international and interdisciplinary phenomenon.
2007 MSA Book Prize
The winner of the 2007 MSA Book Prize is, among other things, the volume that out of our fifty entrants was the most innovative in its own form. At base, this book is a collection of essays; but it’s a collection taking an unusual shape, having unusually high ambitions, and succeeding unusually well in achieving its goals. Crowds (Stanford University Press, 2006), edited by Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Tiews, aims to survey the idea of the crowd across history and geography, not with the goal of being exhaustive, precisely, but with the idea of being as wide-ranging as possible. Thus we have essays on the myth of the “Populus Romanus,” on the crowd during the French Revolution, on masses and number in China, on modernist-era magazine representations of crowds, on mid-century sociology and the lonely crowd, on mentalities of the market, and on many other topics.
But there’s much more to Crowds than breadth. For one thing, the contributions are of an exceptionally high caliber–subtle, penetrating, sometimes funny, always informative. And the contributions don’t only take the form of long essays on historical subjects; at the margins (literally) we get etymologies of crowd-related terms in English, French, Hungarian, Chinese, Sanskrit, and many other languages; and we get personal recollections of being part of certain crowds, including the crowd at Altamont Speedway on 6 December 1969, the crowd at a Dyke March, the crowd at a Barney’s Warehouse Sale. The volume is also replete with illustrations, sometimes happily given double-page spreads; and its part of a larger project that also includes art exhibits and an extraordinarily rich and fascinating web site. For its innovation, for its information, for its excitement–but above all for its sheer quality as a literary-historical inquiry into one of the great themes, one of the propelling subjects and formative conditions, of many modernisms–we on the committee are proud to award this year’s prize to the contributors to and editors of Crowds.
2006 MSA Book Prize
The Book Prize Committee is delighted to speak publicly of the virtues of Victoria Rosner's Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (Columbia University Press, 2004), even as the book aligns itself with the scaffolding of privacy. Addressing scholarly exchanges within Bloomsbury studies and modernism, as well as the recent move to phenomenology and space studies that has complicated the dialectic between public and private, the urban street and the domestic interior, Rosner gets a lot done in this carefully crafted book.
It is a rare thing to be seduced by a table of contents, but the orchestration of chapters beginning with "Kitchen Table Modernism," and on through "Frames," "Thresholds," "Studies," and "Interiors" gives some sense of Rosner's critical imagination. Exquisitely balanced between the particular and the general, and written throughout with critical grace and acuity, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life speaks with equal aplomb of dirty laundry and domestic libraries. In one chapter, for instance, she moves with agility from a fifteen-century account of European interiors dedicated to reading and writing to the important shift in the eighteenth century from the figure of the reader qua solitary male to that of the “secular and gregarious woman”-and on through Arthur Conan Doyle, Radclyff Hall, and A Room of One's Own: from, as Rosner memorably puts it, the closet to the study.
Most stunning is the connection Rosner forges between interiority as a space and interiority as a concept, or the intertwining of psychological and architectural tropes of selfhood. Exploring modernism in this way as both a spatial and temporal phenomenon, she intervenes in long-running conversations, with architecture providing the most accurate lens by which to read not only earlier debates in, say, Lessing and Wilhelm Worringer, but current ones in the work of Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Grosz. Rosner's book will change modernists, even as it speaks to other voices in other rooms.
Michael North's Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word is a sweeping, powerful study that shows how new technologies of representation, especially photography, changed fundamentally the production of visual and verbal art in the early twentieth century. Grounding his analysis in material histories of photography and film, North has produced a transformative account of relations between the word and the image in twentieth-century literature and the definitive account to date of the influence of new media on modernism. Lucidly and with commanding detail, his book provides a compelling account of European and American responses to mechanical recording and offers fresh readings of several American novelists, whose encounters with mechanical reproduction become vivid, and in some cases visible for the first time, thanks to North's exhaustive archival work.
The rich mix of materials in Camera Works is extraordinary. Not only does it uncover the significance of photography to the work of a stunning range of familiar artists such as Ernest Hemingway, Marcel Duchamp, and Pablo Picasso; it also brings attention to under-read figures such as John Dos Passos and forgotten makers such as Robert Carlton Brown - one-time hack writer and author of The Complete Book of Cheese and Let There Be Beer - whose "readies" in the early thirties in effect try to invent the e-book by putting words into motion through a spool-driven machine. Equally compelling is North's chapter on international modernism's struggle with sound, which shows how the arrival of sound in cinema disrupted film's avant-garde aspiration to provide "a universal language of visual forms"; the resulting crisis provoked controversy about the nature of "new sign systems and their relation to the modern audience." Ultimately, North corrects longstanding misconceptions about modernism's supposed resistance to technological modernity by demonstrating the breadth and depth of its interest in new media of all kinds, and how this interest inspired literature and art to become modern in their turn.
The prize committee also wishes to acknowledge the following two books on its shortlist: Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, And The Modern Nation, 1929-1939 (Refiguring Modernism) by Jordana Mendelson; and Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945, by David L. Pike.
2005 MSA Book Prize
At the 2005 MSA Conference in Chicago, the first annual MSA Book Prize was awarded to Michael Leja for Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (University of California Press, 2004). In awarding the prize, the prize committee wrote:
Looking Askance opens up new territory in modernist studies by shifting the focus from artists to audiences and relocating modernism in everyday practices in and about early twentieth-century New York. Challenging assumptions that separate high art from the populace, Michael Leja forges connections from the ground up: as ordinary life itself becomes modernist, so ordinary people start to see art as relevant to the challenges of modern life.
This brilliantly pluralistic study will resonate with a broad spectrum of multidisciplinary interests. Tracking the way questions about the nature of seeing inform self-constructions of the modern subject, Leja moves flexibly through a wide range of surprisingly diverse materials, linking spirit photography, world fairs, circuses, automatic drawing, realist painting, and Marcel Duchamp. In true skeptical fashion, Leja trains his eye on the ambiguities of his materials, refusing to let them settle into either a celebratory or a cynical narrative. Opposites are revealed as similar (P. T. Barnum’s humbug and George Washington’s truth-telling both play on the motif of deception), while humbugs manifest difference (a radical fear of dishonesty versus a source of delight). The final illuminating shift in this complex study is thus from the modern need to negotiate multiple and layered realities to the manifold optical lenses of Leja’s own kaleidoscopic approach.
