UC Santa Cruz Professor Margaret Brose Awarded Prestigious Literature Prize

WASHINGTON, D.C.–The Modern Language Association of America will present its 16th annual Howard R. Marraro Prize to UC Santa Cruz literature professor Margaret Brose for her book, Leopardi Sublime (Bologna, Italy; Re Enzo Editrice, 1998).

The Marraro Prize, which is jointly awarded with the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Literary Studies, is only given every other year. Books published in 1998 or 1999 competed for both prizes, which are awarded to an MLA member who has written a book in the field of Italian literature or comparative literature involving Italian.

"The MLA does not give many prizes, and very few books are chosen," Brose said. "It is a great honor to be selected. In terms of literary studies, the MLA is the largest and most prestigious professional organization."

Brose shared the award with Professor Nancy Canepa of Dartmouth College, who was chosen for her book From Court to Forest: Giambattista Basiles Lo cunto de li cunti and the Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale (Wayne State University Press, 1999).

Professors Brose and Canepa will each be presented with an award certificate and a $500 check December 28 during the associations annual convention in Washington, D.C.

"The MLA award indicates Professor Broses exceptional distinction in her field," said Wlad Godzich, dean of the Humanities Division. "Especially because Leopardi is considered a poet only native speakers of Italian understand and appreciate, this recognition is a significant honor."

In choosing Brose as a prizewinner, the MLA selection committee said her book "is a compelling reminder of how poetry–both as philosophy and as techne–should continue to matter to us."

In Leopardi Sublime, Brose analyzes the poetry of the famous Italian Romantic poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), who was both a brilliant poet and a brilliant theorist of language. The book examines how Leopardis poetry creates the experience of the sublime in the poets encounter with Nature, memory, and temporality–both the rhetorical sublime, characterized by fullness and presence, and the ironic sublime, characterized by absence and loss. Brose demonstrates how Leopardi anticipated many 20th century theories of semiotics and poetics.

"I wanted to show that Leopardi had an original and modern theory both of the Sublime as a philosophical category and of how poetry can produce it," Brose said of her book. "I feel that my critical approach, which perhaps stems from Anglo-American textual criticism more than from the European philological tradition, represents a contribution to the field of Leopardi studies and to discussions of the European Romantic Sublime."

While working on Leopardi for many years, Brose also coedited (with UCSC professor emeritus Hayden White) Representing Kenneth Burke: Selected Papers from the English Institute (John Hopkins University Press, 1982) and authored numerous articles on Italian poets, from the Middle Ages to the present: Petrarch, Foscolo, Leopardi, Ungaretti, and Montale. She is currently working on her next book, entitled "The Body of Italy: Female Figures in Italian Lyric Poetry," which she expects to finish next year.

A member of the Department of Literature at UCSC since 1979, Brose previously taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder and at Yale University. She received her B.A. from Wayne State University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Among her honors and awards are the University of California EAP Visiting Professor Award to the University of Padova (2001), a National Endowment Research Fellowship for University Scholars (1990), an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (1981), and a Fulbright Fellowship to Rome, Italy (1967-68). She was twice a recipient of the Visiting Scholar Award at the American Academy in Rome (1995, 1999).

Brose has also won two Teaching Awards (University of Colorado and UCSC). She has lectured at the universities of Rome, Bologna, Venice, Padova, and Trieste, as well as at UC Berkeley, Northwestern, Harvard, and Stanford universities. Brose is currently the director of the Italian studies major at UCSC and is the past director of the University of California Education Abroad Programs in Italy (1996-1998). Brose is also an elected member of Phi Beta Kappa.

In addition to the Marraro and Scaglione Italian Literary prizes, the MLA will present thirteen other awards during the convention.