Call for MSA Book Prize Nominations

(deadline for receipt of nominations: 7 April 2008; deadline for receipt of books: 15 May)

The Modernist Studies Association seeks nominations for this year's MSA Book Prize, to be awarded to a book with a printed copyright date of 2007. The prize is given each year to a book that makes a significant contribution to modernist studies. The recipient will receive $1000 plus up to $500 toward travel expenses to the 2008 MSA conference, where the award will be presented. Honorable mentions, should the committee decide to confer them, will receive recognition and $150 each. This year, the committee chair is Gail McDonald, Past President of the MSA. The other members are Laura Marcus (University of Edinburgh) and Steven Yao (Hamilton College).

To nominate your own book, send a message to Gail McDonald (G.McDonald@soton.ac.uk) as soon as possible and then contact your publisher to ask that a copy of your book be sent to each of the committee members, at the following addresses:

Gail McDonald
English, School of Humanities
University of Southampton
Southampton SO17 1BJ
UK

Laura Marcus
Department of English Literature
(Floors 6 & 7) David Hume Tower
George Square
Edinburgh EH8 9JX
UK

Steven Yao
Department of English
Hamilton College
198 College Hill Road
Clinton, NY 13323

Please let your publisher know that books should be received by committee members no later than 15 May. Books arriving after that date may be considered for the prize but are not guaranteed consideration.

To nominate someone else's book, send a message to the Prize Committee chair, Gail McDonald (G.McDonald@soton.ac.uk) by no later than Monday, 7 April. The Committee will then request copies of the book from the publisher. The author need not be a member of the MSA.

Please note that self-nomination is strongly encouraged, as it saves a step in the process and helps assure timely receipt of books. Whether a book is nominated by the author or by someone else plays no role in the Committee's deliberations.

Please note also that books must have a publication date of 2007. A book first published in another year will not be eligible for the prize. This exclusion applies even if 2007 saw the release of a new edition (paperback or revised, for example) of the book in question.

Winner of the 2007 MSA Book Prize

At the MSA conference in Long Beach, the MSA Book Prize Committee awarded its annual prize. Below is a summary of the announcement:

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 what it sets out to achieve. Crowds, 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 more 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. Nor is this all. The volume is also replete with illustrations, sometimes happily given double-page spreads; and it’s 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.

Winners of the 2006 MSA Book Prize

At the MSA conference in Tulsa, the MSA Book Prize Committee awarded its annual prize to two books and short-listed two others. Below is the text of the announcement:

The Book Prize Committee is delighted to speak publicly of the virtues of Victoria Rosner's Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life, 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.

Winner of the 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 (Berkeley: 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.