University Assistant Professor of English, Aarthi Vadde is this year’s winner of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Harry Levin Prize for Best First Book in Comparative Literature for her work Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914-2016, Columbia University Press, 2016. Professor Vadde was recently awarded tenure by University.
The Harry Levin Prize is awarded annually for a comparative literature work that is the author’s first book-length publication. Prof. Vadde was awarded the 2018 Levin Prize during the annual meeting held March 29-April 1 in Los Angeles, CA.
The following citation prepared by the prize committee was read as Prof. Vadde was announced as the 2018 Harry Levin winner:
"Tracing the emergence of a modernist internationalism from the works of Rabindranath Tagore to the more recent writings of Zadie Smith, Aarthi Vadde’s Chimeras of Form expands both the historical and the geographical reach of modernist study. The notion of the chimera, both as a mythic figure of the unclassifiable body as well as the botanical and genetic figure of taxonomic rearrangement animates the study and provides a lens through which authors are seen to negotiate between utopian fantasy and political possibility. Recognizing what is perhaps the unfinishable rather than unfinished project of modernity, the book’s mood of “pessoptimism” is registered through a series of lucid readings that focus on a variety of chimerical forms. If, as Vadde argues, the subjects of her study employ formal experimentation to expand the limits of what is sayable, this book will, in turn, make its mark on discussions of modernism, (post)colonialism and internationalism yet to come.”
Chimeras of Form Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914-2016 is available on Amazon.
English Department
