2024

The University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies, established in 2009 and sponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California, is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia in the fields of literary and cultural studies in the previous calendar year. 

Honorable Mention: Talar Chahinian, Stateless: The Politics of the Armenian Language in Exile (Syracuse University Press, 2023)

Some books expand disciplines through their engagement with larger or pressing topics of concern, some through their attention to new territories of space, subject, and thought. Others do so through the ways they build and deploy argument and/or method. Talar Chahinian’s Stateless does all of these things. In her monograph, Chahinian traces and accounts for the development of an exilic consciousness amongst Armenians forced to flee from the 1915 genocide. She contends that literature came to bear the onus for conceptualizing these communities, their politics and a shared identity centered on Armenian language. In vivid detail and through careful close reading, she shows how Armenian-language literature came to be defined by its participation in building a national image around a delayed return to the homeland. The strength of Chahinian’s analysis lies in the structure, clarity, and precision of her argument as well as in the range of her illuminating materials and engagement with theories of trauma. This is a book that enriches and expands the field of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies by its compellingly framed focus on a culture that has been minoritized—not just in our larger discipline, but in historical and literary study more generally. 

Honorable Mention: Brian K. Goodman, The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers across the Iron Curtain (Harvard University Press, 2023) 

For an academic title, Brian K. Goodman’s The Nonconformists is a rare creature: a book so well-written, polished, and engaging you can virtually read it in one sitting. The book explores decades of transnational exchange between American and Czech writers and intellectuals, with special attention to the cultural thaw of 1956-68 and the relationships between Allen Ginsberg and Josef Škvorecký and between Philip Roth and Milan Kundera. Haunting their conversations, cultural festivals, and impassioned polemics is the specter of Franz Kafka, whose cultural and ideological significance shifts with every move of the Iron Curtain but never loses a grip on the diverse audiences on either side of it. The scholarly apparatus is rich and detailed, showing ample evidence of archival research in Czechia and the US as well as a talent for interdisciplinary and comparative analysis. Goodman does an excellent job navigating different American and Czech subcultures, always sensitive to the tensions in the terms applied to them, from the common suspicion of “dissident” to Kundera’s dislike of “Other Europe.” The depth of analysis is maintained throughout the book as a result of a consistent and up-to-date consultation of Czech sources. The Nonconformists never ceases to impress with a fluid, accessible, but always rigorous style. 

Winner: Masha Salazkina

Prize Committee: Martha Kelly (chair), Rory Finnin, and Maria Taroutina