Jane O. Newman, professor of comparative literature and European languages and studies at UC Irvine, will receive the Modern Language Association of America’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study for Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach (Princeton University Press, 2014). For the past 11 years, the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study has been awarded every other year for a translation into English of a book-length work of literary history, literary criticism, or literary theory.
Newman will receive the award at a ceremony on January 9, 2016, during the association’s annual convention in Austin, Texas. The MLA’s selection committee included Sandra L. Bermann (Princeton Univ.), chair; Michael K. Bourdaghs (Univ. of Chicago); and Hassan Melehy (Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), who had the following to say about Newman’s work:
“Jane O. Newman’s Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach is a collection of twenty essays by Erich Auerbach that brings together previously untranslated texts while offering engaging retranslations of a few of his best-known and most complex ones. The essays and the introduction by James Porter provide surprising new insights into the structure and coherence of Auerbach’s groundbreaking contributions to literary theory. Splendidly rendered in limpid, readable prose by Newman, the book brings to its anglophone audience a new and illuminating view of a well-known figure writing in a number of different historical and cultural contexts.”
Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) is best known for his classic literary study Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), and is often considered the founder of U.S. comparative literature. As a comparatist, Newman has long been engaged with Auerbach’s work. She began to plan a book about his work in 2007, the 50th anniversary of Auerbach’s death, when she was invited to present a series of lectures on his thought at several international conferences. For the past four years, she has worked to bring Auerbach’s German-language essays to life for the English-speaking world. Twelve of the twenty essays translated for Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach have never appeared in English before and one—“The Idea of the National Spirit as the Source of the Modern Humanities”—is published here for the first time.
“As both a comparatist and German literature scholar, Newman has been able to provide the English-speaking world with a truly outstanding translation of Auerbach’s works, allowing us to better understand his field-establishing scholarship,” said Georges Van Den Abbeele, dean of the School of Humanities. “We are thrilled that the MLA has bestowed Newman with this honor—she is truly deserving of it.”
In her book about Auerbach, Auerbach’s Worlds: Early / Modern Mimesis between Religion and History, Newman considers his ideas about the earlier periods of European thought and culture in particular. “As a student of western antiquity and the Renaissance, I am interested in providing, via a study of Auerbach, a critical history of the roots of both comparative literature in particular and of the humanities in general in the United States as they were shaped by the crisis events of the early to mid 20th century in a Europe torn apart by two world wars. I focus specifically on the question of how the study of the past functioned for Auerbach and his generation as a way of engaging their tumultuous present. My wager is that the study of the past can continue to function for us as a way of negotiating our equally as tumultuous 21st-century times,” said Newman.
Newman has taught Renaissance and early modern comparative studies at UC Irvine since 1983. During this time, she founded—and often teaches in—the Ph.D. emphasis in literary translation offered through the Department of Comparative Literature. She has also served as the director of the Program in Comparative Literature and as chair of the Department of European Languages and Studies. In addition to Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach, she has authored three books on the German 17th century. Newman has held Humboldt and Guggenheim fellowships and was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Berlin in 2010–11. During 2015-16, she is the M. H. Abrams Fellow at the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle, North Carolina, where she is completing Auerbach’s Worlds.
A paperback edition of Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach will be available in March, 2016.