PROFESSOR
NELSON MOE'S FORTHCOMING BOOK HONORED BY MODERN
LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION
December
11, 2001, New York, NY – The Modern Language
Association of America today announced its fourth
Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award
for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies.
The cash award will be presented to the University
of California Press, which is scheduled to publish
in 2002 a book by Nelson Moe of Barnard College.
Moe, a member of the MLA, will receive a certificate.
The title of his book is The View from Vesuvius:
Italian Culture and the Southern Question.
The award is one of sixteen that will be presented
on 28 December during the association’s
annual convention in New Orleans. The members
of the selection committee were Carol Mastengelo
Bové (Westminster Coll.); Christopher
Kleinhenz (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison); and
Margaret Rosenthal (Univ. of Southern California),
chair. The committee’s citation for the
winning manuscript reads:
Nelson
Moe’s book is a tour-de-force exploration
of how the idea of the south of Italy—the
Southern Question—developed in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries in Europe and Italy.
Moe weaves a richly textured cultural genealogy
based on the evidence of travelers’ narratives,
political pamphlets, letters, parliamentary
inquiries and debates, moral discourses, as
well as engravings and magazine illustrations
that he brings to bear on major literary texts
by Giacomo Leopardi and Giovanni Verga. He
demonstrates that the concept of the Italian
south as backward, picturesque, inferior to
the north, similar to Africa and the Orient,
was the product of the combined pressures
of Eurocentrism, the bourgeois mentality,
and Italian nationalism. This study is a provocative
reassessment of an old question newly conceived
and dictated by larger ideological and political
needs that extend far beyond the geographic
borders of the Italian nation.
Nelson
Moe earned his BA with honors from Wesleyan
University and his PhD from the Johns Hopkins
University. After serving as an assistant professor
at Johns Hopkins and the University of Michigan,
Moe moved to Columbia University in 1994, joining
the Barnard faculty as an associate professor
of Italian in 2001. He specializes in nineteenth-
and twentieth-century Italian culture studies,
with a focus on representations of the south
and problems of national identity. His articles
on modern Italian fiction and poetry, Gramsci,
feminism, film, and cultural theory have appeared
in such works as Making and Remaking Italy:
The Cultivation of National Identity around
the Risorgimento and Oltre il meridionalism:
Nuove prospettive sul Mezzogiorno d’Italia.
For 2000–01, Moe received a Fulbright Fellowship
in Naples; he has also received grants from
the National Endowment for the Humanities and
the Lurcy Foundation. Moe’s long-term projects
include Geography, Culture, Power: Gramsci’s
Southern Question, which he worked on during
his Fulbright fellowship, and Representations
of the South in Italian Cinema. He has also
presented papers at the Institute of Historical
Research, University of London; the University
of Naples; and the Smithsonian Institution.
The Scaglione Publication Award was first presented
in 1998 to the University Press of Toronto to
publish Herman W. Haller’s The Other Italy:
The Literary Canon in Dialect. The University
of Toronto Press also received the prize in
1999, for Gianni Celati: The Craft of Everyday
Storytelling by Rebecca J. West. The most recent
award, given last year, went to the University
of Michigan Press to publish Victoria Kirkham’s
Fabulous Vernacular: Boccaccio’s Filicolo
and the Art of Medieval Fiction.
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 each of the fifty states and the District
of Columbia, as well as from Canada, Latin America,
Europe, Asia, and Africa. PMLA, the association’s
flagship journal, 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 Publication Award
for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies
is awarded under the auspices of the association’s
Committee on Honors and Awards. Other awards
sponsored by the committee are the William Riley
Parker Prize; the James Russell Lowell Prize;
the MLA Prize for a First Book; 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 Howard
R. Marraro Prize; and the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione
Prizes for French and Francophone Studies, 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, and for
a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature.
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.
Jeanne Scaglione’s 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).
Contact: Daniel Wolfe: (212) 584-5003 or dwolfe@corkerygroup.com
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