Each year, the Modernist Studies Association seeks nominations for its Book Prize, awarded to a book published in the previous year. A panel of judges determines the book that made the most significant contribution to modernist studies. The winner receives $1,000 plus up to $500 toward travel expenses to the MSA Conference, where the award is presented. The committee can choose Honorable Mention awards, which will receive recognition at the conference and $150 each. A book first published in another year will not be eligible for the prize. This exclusion applies even if a new edition (paperback or revised, for example) was published in the award year.
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2011 MSA Book Prize
The Modernist Studies Association awards its 2011 Book Prize to Michael Rubenstein's, Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (Notre Dame)
According to Michael Rubenstein, “Irish modernism was largely a literary engagement with the problem of how to forge an Irish modernity after colonialism.” How he goes about supporting this claim—by uncovering Irish modernism’s obsession with public utilities—is as audacious, stunning, and ultimately convincing as the claim itself. In Public Works, Rubenstein comes at this infrastructural unconscious from two directions: elegant close readings of key works by Joyce, Flann O’Brien, and Denis Johnston; and meticulous material history that turns lampposts, sewers, and other quotidian furniture of modernization into exemplars of a colonial process of modernization—a process about which the Irish had every right to be skeptical. This skepticism plays out within each author’s works, and across them, too. While O’Brien’s The Third Policeman pits tradition and Celtic revivalism against the “new dependencies” that electrification exacts from the unsuspecting populace, Joyce’s Ulysses, which Rubenstein recasts, brilliantly, as a “postcolonial comedy of development,” envisions waterworks and other utilities of circulation as harbingers of an independent Ireland: an Ireland possessing the ability to engineer itself via infrastructural control, thus solving “the problem of the Irish underdeveloped identity.” What makes this book especially remarkable is Rubenstein’s recuperation of infrastructure as a technology of citizenship in general—a mechanism for post-colonial self-definition well beyond Ireland and its era of development—and as an everyday vehicle of utopian thought.
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