Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies Awarded to Daniel Heller-Roazen
New York, NY—2 December 2008—The Modern Language Association of America today announced it is awarding its sixteenth annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies to Daniel Heller-Roazen, of Princeton University, for his book /The Inner Touch:Archaeology of a Sensation/, published by Zone Books. The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding scholarly work that is written by a member of the association and that involves at least two literatures.
The prize is one of sixteen awards that will be presented on 28 December 2008 during the association’s annual convention, held this year in San Francisco. The members of the selection committee were Rita Copeland (Univ. of Pennsylvania); Margaret Higonnet (Harvard Univ.), chair; and Sharon Marcus (Columbia Univ.). The committee’s citation for Heller-Roazen’s book reads:
/The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation /covers a philosophical and literary itinerary of exceptional breadth, a panoply of philosophical and literary works. This ambitious and eloquent study is especially valuable for enriching and renewing the debate on biopolitics. It productively extends a theoretical genealogy that links Derrida, Nancy, and Agamben. Daniel Heller-Roazen writes with seductive grace and love of detail, combining erudition with a gift for scholarly story-telling. But this is also a book with a steely diachronic spine. It moves gracefully from Aristotle’s thought and its legacy in late antiquity to medieval Arabic science and finally to modern thought about consciousness and sensation. /The Inner Touch/ can be recommended to anyone who wants to know about the intellectual history of what we call the aesthetic.
Daniel Heller-Roazen is professor of comparative literature at Princeton University. He did his undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto and received his MA and PhD from Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of /Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language/ and /Fortune’s Faces: The /Roman de la Rose /and the Poetics of Contingency/. His articles have appeared in collections and journals such as /Critical Inquiry/, /MLN /and /October/. He is the recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowship and the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. He is currently finishing a book project tentatively titled /The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations /and completing the Norton Critical Edition of the Arabian Nights.
The MLA, the largest and one of the oldest American learned societies in the humanities (est. 1883), promotes the advancement of literary and linguistic studies. The 30,000 members of the association come from all fifty states and the District of Columbia, as well as from Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. /PMLA/, the association’s flagship journal, has published distinguished scholarly articles for over one hundred years. Approximately 9,500 members of the MLA and its allied and affiliate organizations attend the association’s annual convention each December. The MLA is a constituent of the American Council of Learned Societies and the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures.
The Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, awarded under the auspices of the MLA’s Committee on Honors and Awards, was presented for the first time in 1993. Its winners have been Jean H. Hagstrum (1992), John T. Irwin (1993), Mitchell Greenberg (1994), Chana Kronfeld (1996), Linda Haverty Rugg (1997), Dorrit Cohn (1998), Leonard Barkan (1999), Marie-Laure Ryan (2000), Victoria Nelson (2001), Ian Balfour (2002), Alessia Ricciardi (2003), Loren Kruger (2004), Evelyne Ender (2005), and Toril Moi (2006). Honorable mentions were awarded to Renata Wasserman (1994), Ursula K. Heise (1997), Sharon Marcus (1999), Barbara Fuchs (2001), Avital Ronell (2001), Charles Bernheimer (2002), Barbara Johnson (2003), Susanne Kord (2003), and Neil Kenny (2004).
