Lawrence Buell Wins 2003
Warren Brooks Award
March 29, 2004
Bowling Green, Ky. - A Harvard University professor is the 2003 recipient of the Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism from the Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies at Western Kentucky University.
Dr. Lawrence Buell will receive the award for "Emerson," an assessment of Ralph Waldo Emerson's works. The award is presented annually at the Robert Penn Warren Symposium at Western. This year's symposium is April 25.
The jury said Dr. Buell was selected "for a book worthy of both the great philosopher he chose as his topic and of the Brooks and Warren tradition of excellence in literary criticism." "Emerson" was published in 2003 by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
The jury added: "In an elegant, clear-speaking style—notably free of pretentious academic jargon—Dr. Buell cogently assesses Emerson's radically original contributions to fields of thought as disparate as science, politics, religion, philosophy, literature and social action. In each of these and other categories, Professor Buell provides a compelling detailed account of Emerson's influence upon later generations of thinkers."
Dr. Buell is the John P. Marquand Professor of English at Harvard. He is also the author of "The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture" and "Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture and Environment in the United States and Beyond," both from Harvard University Press. He holds a master's degree and doctorate in English from Cornell University.
"I am honored that my "Emerson" has been chosen as this year's recipient of the Warren-Brooks Award," Dr. Buell said. "I also confess to being somewhat bemused and surprised that a book about a New England icon toward whom both Mr. Warren and Mr. Brooks felt distinctly ambivalent would be honored in their name, especially considering that only one of its seven chapters is exclusively devoted to Emerson's accomplishment as a creative writer. So for that particular book to be awarded this prize particular seems deliciously ironic. On the other hand, Emerson always aspired to be a poet first and foremost, and it's no less true that Brooks and Warren were my own first and foremost instructors in the art of reading literary texts. I take the judge's verdict as heartening evidence that Emerson did not aspire in vain, and that my early training somehow managed to stick."
The Warren/Brooks Award was established in 1995 and is made possible by an endowment from the late Eleanor Clark Warren, the Warren Estate and Western Kentucky University. The award is given annually to recognize an outstanding work of literary criticism that exemplifies in spirit, scope and integrity the kind of innovative critical interpretation of literature offered by Warren and Brooks, his frequent collaborator.
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