Office of Public Information and Communications Columbia University New York, N.Y. 10027 (212) 854-5573
The Modern Language Association of America will award its first Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures to Robert A. Maguire, professor of Russian at Columbia University, for his book Exploring Gogol, published by Stanford University Press. The biennial prize recognizes outstanding scholarly work on the linguistics or literatures of the languages. Dr. Maguire will receive $1,000 and a certificate December 28 at the association's annual convention, in Chicago.
Members of the prize selection committee are Caryl Emerson (Princeton University), chair; Peter Steiner (University of Pennsylvania); and William Mills Todd III (Harvard University). Their citation follows:
"Rather than link Gogol's particular genius to a single critical aesthetic-romantic, realist, symbolist, modernist-Robert Maguire's study adopts the more challenging approach of thick description and close reading from the bottom up in a search for the vision and texture that constitute Gogol's weird magic. Why is Gogol at first so funny, then so scary, finally so real? His vision, Maguire argues, is governed by several constants-all informed by folk belief-that move from the eye to the word: the inviolability of bounded space, the necessity of knowing one's place, the value of 'distanced height' to the artist, and the word as incantation. The book is full-bodied, non-reductive literary scholarship at its illuminating best."
Dr. Maguire is Bakhmeteff Professor of Russian Studies at Columbia, where he has taught since 1962. Before then he taught at Duke University and Dartmouth College. He has held visiting appointments at Indiana University, Oxford, the University of Illinois, and Yale, Princeton, and Harvard Universities. He has had grants and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
In addition to the prizewinning book, he has published Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 1920's (1968, 1987)and Gogol from the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays (1976), as well as several edited volumes and translations, some 40 articles, 20 shorter translations from Russian and Polish, and 50 reviews.
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