Modern Language Association prize
Yale professor Noël Valis has won the Modern Language Association of America's (MLA) 13th annual Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for an Outstanding Book Published in English in the Field of Latin American and Spanish Literatures and Cultures.
Valis, who is professor of Spanish and director of undergraduate studies in Spanish and Portuguese, was honored for her book "The Culture of Cursilería: Bad Taste, Kitsch, and Class in Modern Spain," published by Duke University Press.
The committee's citation for Valis's book reads, in part: "Integrating social practices, historiography, journalism, fashion, life stories, interior decoration, and literature in her interpretation of 19th- and 20th-century Spanish middle-class culture, Valis takes the seemingly self-explanatory phenomenon lo cursi and demonstrates its complexity, arguing that lo cursi underlies the processes of Spanish modernization. The originality and power of Valis's analysis rest on the strength of her scholarship, on the suggestive way she conceives her project, and on the brilliant textual readings of both canonical and unconventional texts."
An expert in 19th- and 20th-century Spanish literature and culture, Valis has translated four books and is the author of "The Decadent Vision in Leopoldo Alas" and "The Novels of Jacinto Octavio Picón." She is also co-editor of "In the Feminine Mode: Essays on Hispanic Women Writers." She has two books in progress: "Body Sacraments: Resurrecting the Imagination in Hispanic Narrative" and "Teaching Representations of the Spanish Civil War."
The MLA prize was established in 1990 by a gift from Joseph and Mimi B. Singer, parents of the late Katherine Singer Kovacs, a specialist in Spanish and Latin American literature and film who taught at Stanford University, the University of Southern California, and Whittier College. The annual award consists of a certificate and $1,000. Previous winners include Yale professor Roberto González Echevarría.
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