Submitted by Rick Aguilar
on
Aria Fani's first book, Reading across Borders: Afghans, Iranians, and Literary Nationalism (U. of Texas Press, 2024) has won the American Comparative Literature's prestigious René Wellek prize for best monograph in the field. The members of the prize committee write,
"The book is organized around two major words: adabiyāt, the Persian term for literature derived from the modern European notion of literature as an institutionalized corpus of texts that expresses the ethos and the achievements of a people, and adab, the non-European derived Persian word that unites the aesthetics and ethics in its idea of literature. What makes this book an “outstanding book in the discipline” is its ability to show the crucial role that comparative literature plays to understand the complexities of our contemporary world by using a context-specific study to engage with the major debates within world literature, postcolonial studies, and the humanities.
Methodologically, Reading across Borders offers a convincing example of what twenty-first century comparativism can and should look like. There is a lot to praise in this book and we would not do it justice by listing the main lessons one can learn here, but we do want to mention the epilogue, “Who Needs Literature Today?” as a personal, vulnerable meditation on what it takes to enter the classroom each day and engage with “what it means to be a living person and reading literature” (183).
To read the full citation, see here. MELC congratulates Professor Fani on this honor and the broader field’s recognition of his contributions.