Patrizia C. McBride, director of the Institute for German Cultural Studies and professor of German Studies, received an honorable mention from the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) for her book “The Chatter of the Visible: Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany.”
The Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures is awarded biennially for an outstanding scholarly work on the linguistics or literatures of the Germanic languages, including Danish, Dutch, German, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish and Yiddish.
In its citation, the MLA prize selection committee writes that McBride’s book “revisits montage, the key aesthetic form of the early twentieth century, and offers an illuminating new reading that promises to recast our understanding of the aesthetic and perceptual shifts of the era.
“Crossing Dada, constructivism, and new objectivity, McBride’s account reveals the overlooked narrative dimension and force of montage aesthetics and offers alternative modes of envisioning cohesion and world making in a new media environment.”
McBride’s research and teaching span German-language literature and culture from the 18th to the 20th century. In “The Chatter of the Visible: Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany,” McBride traces the path-breaking notion of storytelling developed under the rubric of montage by Weimar-era artists associated with Dadaism, Constructivism and the New Objectivity in high and low-brow genres and media.
