Prix du MLA pour les études françaises et francophones

Melanie C. Hawthorne named winner of MLA’s Scaglione prize for french and francophone studies; Michele Longino
receives honorable mention

New York, NY – November 27, 2002 – The Modern Language Association of America today announced it is awarding its tenth annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Literary Studies to Melanie C. Hawthorne, of Texas A&M University, for her book Rachilde and French Women’s Authorship: From Decadence to Modernism, published by the University of Nebraska Press. Michèle Longino, of Duke University, received honorable mention for her book Orientalism in French Classical Drama, published by Cambridge University Press. The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding book in its field—a literary or linguistic study, a critical edition of an important work, or a critical biography—written by a member of the association. Hawthorne will receive a $2,000 check and a certificate, and Longino will receive a certificate.

The Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Literary Studies is one of fifteen awards that will be presented on 28 December 2002 during the association’s annual convention, held this year in New York. The members of the selection committee were Danielle Marx-Scourras (Ohio State Univ., Columbus); Stephen Nichols (Johns Hopkins Univ.), chair; and Sandy Petrey (State Univ. of New York, Stony Brook). The committee’s citation for Hawthorne’s book reads:

Melanie C. Hawthorne charts new waters by combining feminist perspectives and cultural studies to fashion a literary biography as innovative as it is original. By focusing on an author influential for her historical role as well as for her writing, Hawthorne offers a new perspective on authorship at the end of the nineteenth century in Europe, while demonstrating the intricate imbrications of modernism and decadence. Through her talent in making biography a keen analytic instrument for critical studies, Hawthorne vividly renders one of the truly original literary figures of the late nineteenth century and carves out a new space for Rachilde in the literary and critical canon of the period.

Melanie C. Hawthorne is professor of French at Texas A&M University. She holds a BA from the University of Oxford, England, and her MA and PhD in French literature from the University of Michigan. She is the editor of Contingent Loves: Simone de Beauvoir and Sexuality and coeditor of Gender and Fascism in Modern France. She has also translated Rachilde’s The Juggler; Marie Lenéru’s The Woman Triumphant, which appeared in Modern Drama by Women, 1880s –1930s: An International Anthology; and Gisèle d’Estoc’s "The Psychology of Joan of Arc" and "A Missed Marriage," which appeared in Nineteenth-Century Women Seeking Expression: Translations from the French. She has had numerous chapters and articles published in various books, journals, and reference works, including French Review, L’Esprit Créateur, and Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature. She is currently coauthoring A Cultural Guide to Doing Business in France and has translated and coedited Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus.

The committee’s citation for Professor Longino’s book reads:

Michèle Longino’s Orientalism in French Classical Drama combines the insights offered by postcolonial studies of recent date and the orientalism that titillated early modern Europe with its visions of exotic alterity. Orientalism and postcolonial studies do not usually appear in the same arena with seventeenth-century dramatists such as Racine, Molière, and Corneille. With subtle and nuanced arguments, Longino weaves these disparate threads into a series of tableaux as fascinating and convincing as they are original.

Michèle Longino is a professor of French at Duke University, where she also serves as director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies. She earned her BA from Rosary College, MA from Claremont Graduate School, and PhD from the University of Michigan. Before teaching at Duke, Longino was affiliated with Rice University. She has been awarded National Humanities Center and Camargo Foundation fellowships as well as a Lilly Teaching Fellowship, an NEH Fellowship for University Teachers, and numerous research grants from Duke University and Rice University. Longino’s work has been published in EMF: Studies in Early Modern France, L’Esprit Créateur, French Review, and Cahiers du dix-septième: An Interdisciplinary Journal, among other academic periodicals. In addition to Orientalism in French Classical Drama, she is the author of Performing Motherhood: The Sévigné Correspondence.

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 flagship journal of the association, 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 French and Francophone Literary Studies was presented for the first time in 1993. Past recipients have been Jody Enders, Thomas M. Kavanagh, Janet L. Beizer, Cynthia J. Brown and Helen Solterer, Lynn A. Higgins, Suzanne Guerlac and Kathryn A. Hoffmann, George Hoffman, Margaret Cohen and Philip Watts, and Timothy Hampton.

Other awards sponsored by the Committee on Honors and Awards are the William Riley Parker Prize; the James Russell Lowell Prize; the MLA Prize for a First Book; the Howard R. Marraro Prize; the Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize; the Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize; the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars; the MLA Prizes for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition and for a Distinguished Bibliography; the Morton N. Cohen Award; the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize; the Lois Roth Award; the William Sanders Scarborough Prize; the Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize; and the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prizes for Comparative Literary Studies, for Italian Studies, for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures, for a Translation of a Literary Work, for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature, and for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies.

The Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Endowment Fund was established and donated by Aldo Scaglione to the MLA in 1987. The fund honors the memory of his wife, Jeanne Daman Scaglione. A Roman Catholic, Jeanne Daman taught in a Jewish kindergarten in Brussels, Belgium. When deportation of Jews began in 1942, she helped find hiding places for 2,000 children. She also helped rescue many Jewish men by obtaining false papers for them. Her life and contributions to humanity are commemorated in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

Aldo Scaglione, a member of the MLA since 1957, is Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature at New York University. A native of Torino, Italy, he received a doctorate in modern letters from the University of Torino. He has taught at the University of Toulouse and the University of Chicago. From 1952 to 1968 he taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and from 1968 to 1987 he was W. R. Kenan Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In 1987 he came to New York University as professor of Italian and then served as chair of the Department of Italian. He has been a Fulbright fellow and a Guggenheim fellow, has held senior fellowships from the Newberry Library and the German Academic Exchange Service, and has been a visiting professor at Yale University, the City University of New York, and the Humanities Research Institute of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In 1975 he was named Cavaliere dell’ Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana. He has been president of the American Boccaccio Association and was a member of the MLA Executive Council from 1981 to 1984. His published books include Nature and Love in the Late Middle Ages (1963), Ars Grammatica (1970), The Classical Theory of Composition (1972), The Theory of German Word Order (1980), The Liberal Arts and the Jesuit College System (1986), Knights at Court: Courtliness, Chivalry, and Courtesy from Ottonian Germany to the Italian Renaissance (1991), and Essays on the Arts of Discourse: Linguistics, Rhetoric, Poetics (1998).