The Anna Balakian Prize

The first Anna Balakian Prize was awarded to Line Henriksen for her book Ambition and Anxiety: Ezra Pound's Cantos and Derek Walcott's Omeros as Twentieth-Century Epics. In the first general assembly of the eighteenth Congress of the ICLA, Douwe Fokkema, chair of the selection jury, read the citation and presented the award.

Rules for Submitting Books and Information about the Selection Process

(Approved by the Executive Committee of the ICLA on
June 22, 2006)

As reported in the Bulletin of the International Comparative Literature Association (22:2) the establishment of the Anna Balakian Prize was officially announced on August 14, 2004, at the seventeenth Congress of the ICLA in Hong Kong. Support for the Prize, consisting of US $1000, has been donated by the family of Anna Balakian, Friends of the ICLA, and the New York University ICLA Fund. The Prize is intended to promote scholarly research by younger comparatists and to honor the memory of Professor Anna Balakian, a great comparatist. It will again be awarded at the next ICLA Congress in Daegu (July 2010) for an outstanding first book in comparative literature studies by a single author under forty years of age.

Rules for submitting books

(1) Books published between January 2007 and December 2009 are eligible in this cycle. The winner will be named in early 2010, and the Prize will be bestowed at that year's Congress.

(2) Books published between January 2010 and December 2012 will be eligible for the third cycle in which the Prize will be awarded in 2014, and so forth, on a triennial basis.

(3) Books on comparative literature topics by an author under forty years of age can be submitted at the time of publication. The books must have a literary-critical approach and deal with such areas through a comparative optic as literary aesthetics or poetics, literature and the arts, literary movements, historical or biographical influences on literature, cross-fertilization of regional or national literatures, and literary criticism on an international plane. Studies that are primarily ethnic or gender-related or restricted to a single literature are not eligible for the Prize. In this cycle electronic publications are excluded.

(4) Books not in English or French, the official languages of the ICLA, should be accompanied by a summary in English or French of at least 2000 words.

(5) The author may propose him- or herself for the Prize, preferably with a recommendation by a former dissertation or research supervisor or senior comparatist. Any member of the ICLA may also propose candidates for the Prize. However, it is exclusively the responsibility of the author to provide Prof. Steven P. Sondrup, Secretary of the ICLA, with three copies of the book --- or one book and two xerox copies of it --- as well as three copies of the accompanying letter and of the recommendation before January 2, 2010. In principle, the books will not be returned but donated to a library or another appropriate institution. The author should also provide a permanent mailing address as well as an email address to the ICLA Secretary. The mailing address of Prof. Sondrup is: Scandinavian Studies, Brigham Young University, HRCB, Provo, UT 84602-4538, USA.

(6) The winner will be invited to attend the ICLA Congress in order to receive the award. Travel costs will be reimbursed by the ICLA Treasurer up to a maximum of US$ 1000.

Information about the selection process

(a) The Secretary of the ICLA acknowledges receipt of the books (or book and xerox copies) and forwards them to the members of the jury.

(b) The members of the jury are free to seek appropriate advice from relevant experts, for instance in the case of publications in languages they cannot read. Such advice remains confidential.

(c) The members of the jury decide by majority vote.

(d) Once the jury has determined the winner, a designated representative will write a report explaining the merits of the book. The report will be transmitted to the President and Secretaries of the ICLA at least three months before the next ICLA Congress. At the same time, the winner will be informed. The report will be read on the bestowal of the Prize and published in the ICLA Bulletin or on the ICLA Website: icla.byu.edu/www/

Balakian Prize, July 30, 2007 -- 18th ICLA Congress, Rio de Janeiro
Statement by her daughter, Professor Suzanne Nalbantian

It is particularly meaningful that the first Anna Balakian Prize was given on July 30, 2007 at the 18th ICLA Congress, almost exactly ten years after her death on August 12, l997.

Anna Balakian belonged to the first generation of comparatists whose lives of immigrant status from European countries provided the multilingual backgrounds for the discipline. Having first embarked on a career in French literature as a pioneering critic of Surrealism, her avant-garde spirit led her to the field of comparative literature. She took part in a founding meeting of the ICLA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in l958. As a strong bond of collegiality emerged from this group of comparatists who subsequently met in conferences all over Western and Eastern Europe, she experienced and promoted the fraternity of this discipline. The post-World War II era provided the climate of "one-world theory" and internationalism which was germane to the birth of the discipline and which she saw as a possible antidote to excessive nationalism.

As Balakian moved into the growing field as a professor of comparative literature, she became involved in its institutions, holding subsequent positions as a member for three decades of the coordinating committee of The Comparative History of Literature in European Languages. She became an editor of its volume on Symbolism (1982), as well as president of the ACLA, vice president of the ICLA, and chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University until l986. One of the most fulfilling moments for her in the field came when in l982 at NYU she hosted the Tenth Triennial Congress of the ICLA, attended by 700 delegates from sixty nations.

Anna Balakian made her imprint in academe with over forty-five years of teaching, writing and lecturing worldwide. She was the author of numerous books and articles on Surrealism, Symbolism and Post-Symbolism. Her books include The Literary Origins of Surrealism (1947), Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute (1959), The Symbolist Movement (1967) and The Fiction of the Poet: From Mallarmé to the Post-Symbolist Mode (1992). Her book André Breton: The Magus of Surrealism (1971) was the first critical biography of the French poet. In her last essay volume The Snowflake on the Belfry (1994) she voiced strong views on influence studies and multiculturalism. Her own study of comparative literature had led her to unfamiliar literatures, as she unearthed a rainbow coalition of writers from Eastern Europe, Japan and Africa, with a special penchant for South American writers who came under the influence of Surrealism. In this context, in l990, she translated from the Spanish the surrealist work Eva la Fuga by the little-known Chilean poet Rosamel del Valle, who was in her view the Latin American counterpart of André Breton. Balakian's final model for literary criticism of a "pyramid of similitude and difference" took into consideration the problematic tension between the oneness vision and the multiplicity vision in the study of literature. She believed that a level of consensus about artistic merit could be reached in the aesthetic density at the top of the pyramid, beyond the whims of national or international politics. A truly independent-minded scholar and a fierce nonconformist, far ahead of her times, she has left a rich legacy of humanism and globalism that has continuing relevance. She would have particularly valued this prize for younger critics, as her ever-youthful spirit made her deeply attentive to the up-and-coming generations of comparatists.