Department of English

Professor Paul Saint-Amour was awarded the first annual Matei Calinescu Prize by the Modern Language Association for his book Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford University Press, 2015). The prize, for a distinguished work of scholarship in twentieth- or twenty-first-century literature and thought, was established this year in honor of Matei Calinescu, a Romanian poet and scholar who taught at Indiana University, Bloomington. Books published in 2014 and 2015 were eligible for the award in its inaugural year.

The committee’s citation for the book reads: “This beautiful book turns its face to death and to the sky. Looking up, it looks in, unsealing a historical and literary archive in which the threats of air war and of anonymous oblivion illuminate transformations in the human relation to time. Tense Future is a book about modernism, modernity, the social effects of our creeping awareness of the total, and the awesome glory and violence of the idea of everything. Its readings glow and its sentences sing. Paul Saint-Amour has written a book whose scope of mind and range of intellectual ambition speak to the best of what literary criticism is and should be."