Criticism Award
March 16, 2007
Bowling
Green, Ky. - David Rosen of Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., is the 2006 recipient of the Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism.
The Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies at Western Kentucky University and its Advisory Group selected Dr. Rosen for his work “Power, Plain English, and the Rise of Modern Poetry,” published in 2006 by Yale University Press.
Dr. Patricia Bradley, associate professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University and a member of the award jury, said Dr. Rosen’s work was “a finely written study and a work very much in the Warren-Brooks tradition of innovative critical interpretation,” even though the names of Brooks and Warren are never invoked in the work.
“Power, Plain English, and the Rise of Modern Poetry” explores poets’ common use of plain English, which Dr. Rosen also refers to as the low register, not only through close readings of their poetry but also from biographical, psychological, rhetorical, and, to a certain extent, deconstructive perspectives, Dr. Bradley said.
In doing so, Dr. Rosen establishes the utility of the low register to Wordsworth and the Modernists who would follow as well as the imagined power the low register confers and the psychological drama of the artist it exposes, she said.
Dr. Rosen, who holds a master’s and doctoral degrees from Yale University, joined Trinity College in 2002. He teaches British and Modern poetry and is working on a book on privacy theory.
“I am astonished and honored by the news,” Dr. Rosen said. “What an unexpected turn of events!”
The award and a $1,000 prize will be presented on April 22 during the 20th Annual Salute to Robert Penn Warren in WKU’s Mass Media and Technology Hall.
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 WKU. 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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