Assistant Professor of Literatures in English Pardis Dabashi has been awarded the 2024 Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize for her monograph Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modernist Novel, from the University of Chicago Press.
Each year, a panel of judges determines the book published in the previous year, that made the most significant contribution to modernist studies.
Dabashi teaches classes on twentieth-century literature, film, and theory, and her research examines the intersection of form, politics, and affect in narrative film and literary modernism. Losing the Plot explores the relationship between literature and classical Hollywood cinema and reveals a profound longing for a plot in modernist fiction.
From the Association:
"With its dazzlingly original and sophisticated analyses of both novels and films, Losing the Plot sets a new standard for interdisciplinarity. As modernist novels became more fragmentary and plotless, films became more straightforwardly narrative – and the comforting promises of the bourgeois realist plot to which film increasingly cleaves in the early twentieth century, Dabashi argues, become “an object of complicated longing: for both modernist novelists and their characters. They long for the “structures of consequence” that they sense “would deliver them from the groundlessness of paratactical experience.” With effortless, clear-eyed aplomb, this book shakes apart what one thinks one knows about modernist film, the modernist novel, and even the very nuts and bolts of plot."
Literatures in English
Film Studies
