The Wayne State University College of Liberal Arts is pleased to announce that Barrett Watten, professor of English, is the recipient of the 2004 René Wellek Prize for his recent book, The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (Wesleyan, 2003).

"The Wellek Prize, named for one of the most influential comparative literature scholars of the 20th century, is among the nation's most prestigious prizes for scholarship in comparative literature. Past recipients of the prize include the internationally known scholars Umberto Eco, Geoffrey Hartman, and Katherine Hayles," said Robert Thomas, Interim Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. "This award represents strong national and international recognition of Watten's work, and is reflective of the outstanding scholarship by the faculty of Wayne State University's English Department."

The René Wellek Prize is one of the United States' highest honors in the discipline of comparative literature, recognizing an outstanding work in the field of literary and cultural theory. The 2004 Prize will be presented at the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Annual Meeting at the University of Michigan on April 17, 2004. The ACLA, founded in 1960, is the principal learned society in the United States for scholars whose work involves several literatures and cultures as well as the premises of cross-cultural literary study itself.

Watten is author of Total Syntax (1985), a collection of essays on avant-garde poetics. Other essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Modernism/Modernity, Genre, Poetics Today, Sagetrieb, Textual Practice, and Mark(s). He was editor of This (1971-82), co-editor of Poetics Journal (1982-98), and co-author of Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union (1991). Recent and forthcoming collections of his literary work include: Frame (1971-1990) (1997), Bad History (1998) and Progress/Under Erasure (2004).

As one of the founding poets and editors of the Language School of poetry and one of its central theorists, Watten has consistently challenged the boundaries of literature and art. In The Constructivist Moment, he offers a series of theoretically informed and textually acute readings that advance a revisionist account of the avant-garde through the methods of cultural studies. His major topics include American modernist and postmodern poetics, Soviet constructivist and post-Soviet literature and art, Fordism and Detroit techno - each seen as examples of how social movements affect art and culture. His book places the linguistic turn of critical theory and the avant guarde in relation to postcolonial studies, feminism and race theory. As such, the book offers a crucial revisionist perspective within modernist and avant-garde studies.

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