Jeffrey Sacks' Iterations of Loss Wins Harry Levin Prize by ACLA
By FUPress
2nd April 2016
Jeffrey Sacks, associate professor and director of Arabic Studies at the University of California, Riverside, is also the author of “Iterations of Loss: Mutilation and Aesthetic Form, al-Shidyaq to Darwish,” which was published in Spring 2015. This is his first published book, and he is now being awarded the Harry Levin Prize for his “series of sensitive, evocative readings of Arabic and Arab Jewish texts from the 19th century to the present day.”
According to UCR Today, “the prize, established in 1985, is named for the late Harry T. Levin, an American literary critic and Harvard University scholar of modernism and comparative literature. Sacks is a co-winner of the 2016 prize with Brown University’s Tamara T. Chin, and accepted the award at the ACLA meeting in Boston March 17-20.” It is awarded to scholars for outstanding first books in Comparative Literature by the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA).
Iterations of Loss addresses nineteenth through twenty-first century Arabic and Arab Jewish writing (Mahmoud Darwish, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Elias Khoury, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Shimon Ballas, and Taha Husayn), showing that language interrupts is domestication into the forms of temporal and aesthetic coherency privileged in the monolingual state in West Asia.
We at Fordham University Press are so glad to have Jeffrey Sacks on our team and are so proud of his dedication to his field and his incredible work. This first book is just the beginning!