March 14, 2001

Frank Kermode To Receive Warren-Brooks Award
For 2000

Bowling Green, Ky. - Frank Kermode, author of "Shakespeare's Language," will receive the 2000 Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award, presented by the Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies at Western Kentucky University.

Kermode has published more than a dozen volumes of literary criticism and has taught at several universities, including University College in London and Cambridge. He has also been a visiting professor at Columbia, Harvard and Yale.

"Shakespeare's Language" reflects a lifetime of scholarship, but is intended for a non-professional audience. Kermode argues in his study that about 1600, Shakespeare achieved a new level of complexity as he strove to make language "imitate the actual movement of thought in a character's mind." Kermode traces this stylistic development, along with the challenges it poses for the audience, through close textual analysis.

The Warren-Brooks Award was established seven years ago by the Advisory Group for the Center. It is presented annually for an outstanding work of literary criticism that exemplifies the spirit, scope and integrity of the critical studies produced by Warren and Brooks. Past recipients include Ronald Schuchard, Denis Donoghue, John Hollander, Mark Royden Winchell and Lewis P. Simpson.

This year's award, which includes a $1,000 prize and certificate, will be presented at the 14th annual Robert Penn Warren Symposium on April 29 at Western.

For more information, contact Mary Ellen Miller, professor of English at WKU, at (270) 745-5721. More WKU news is available on the World Wide Web at www.wku.edu. If you'd like to receive WKU news via E-mail, send a message to WKUNews@wku.edu.