Professor Cohen Wins Réné Wellek Prize
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| Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman was published in 2015 |
GW English is happy to announce that Professor Jeffrey Cohen’s 2015 monograph Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman will be awarded the Réné Wellek Prize for the best book in comparative literature from the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA).
The ACLA writes that the Réné Wellek prize:
“recognizes an outstanding book in the discipline of comparative literature; fields may include literary or cultural theory or history, or any other field of comparative literature. The 2017 Wellek Prize will be awarded to a book published during the calendar years 2015 and 2016, and will be awarded at the ACLA annual meeting in 2017 at Utrecht University in Utrecht, the Netherlands.”
Stone has been widely reviewed; the prestigious Los Angeles Review of Books writes:
“Stone seeks liveliness in what might be the most mundane of substances. For too long, the lithic has been thought of as cold and inert, the unchanging foil to life’s rapid evolution. If our historic engagement with stone is the story of cave painting, toolmaking, and home building, Cohen wants to recover a secret history that moves beyond such utilitarian domination. His version is about collaboration and gregarious commingling between humans and stones. Look closely at ammonite and watch the borderline between the organic and inorganic quietly dissolve. Contemplate a gem to reveal medieval lapidary magic, global trade routes, and the humbling scale of deep time. Cohen zooms out from a pebble to a planet and finds ‘a durable link to a dynamic cosmos.'”
You can read the full text of the Los Angeles Review of Books review here. Congratulations Professor Cohen, or as they say in Utrecht, hartelijk gefeliciteerd!
