Congratualians to our alumna Emily Van Buskirk, Associate Professor of Russian at Rutgers University, on winning the AATSEEL Prize for Best Book in Literary Criticism.

BEST BOOK IN LITERARY CRITICISM

Emily Van Buskirk, Lydia Ginzburg’s Prose: Reality in Search of Literature.

Lydia Ginzburg's Prose: Reality in Search of Literature (Princeton UP, 2016) by Emily Van Buskirk is a remarkable book, both for the depth of its insights into the writing of one of the twentieth century’s most thoughtful witnesses and critics, and for the understated originality of its own approach to scholarly writing about reality and literature. Drawing on her pioneering archival research, Van Buskirk carefully reconstructs the mechanisms of self-writing in Ginsburg’s extensive fragmentary prose, in the process shedding light on what she incisively identifies as the Soviet intelligentsia’s “post-individualist self.” Even as she follows her protagonist everywhere and queries the narratives of Soviet experience, Van Buskirk also thinks sensitively and critically about the universal experiences of love, suffering, and aging. Subtly combining history, biography, and literary analysis, Van Buskirk’s book is a model of ground-breaking and rigorous scholarship to be studied and emulated.