2010 — Susan Stanford Friedman
Susan Stanford Friedman, Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women’s Studies and Sally Mead Hands Bascom Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Madison, is an expert in many areas within the two broad fields of her double named chairs. Her own self-declared fields of interest include 20th and 21st Centuries American, British, and Anglophone world literatures; modernism and modernity; women’s writing; feminist theory; comparative postcolonial, diaspora, migration, transnational, and border theory and literature; psychoanalysis; multiculturalism and race studies; contemporary cultural theory, especially anthropology and geography; film; and not least, narrative theory. Indeed, readers of her important work in fields apparently distant from narrative theory meet a mind that habitually brings theories into conversation with one another, applies theories to emergent literatures, and derives theories from wide reading and deep knowledge. We will not be able to disentangle the narrative theorist from all the other scholarly identities that Susan Friedman blends, but we can single out some of her special attainments in narrative literature and theory as we honor her today.
She has a long and fruitful relationship with the Narrative Society, including serving as its President in the early 1990s. Susan Stanford Friedman hosted and coordinated the 1989 Narrative Conference held in Madison Wisconsin, and she subsequently guest edited the spring 1990 issue of The Journal of Narrative Technique featuring papers from that conference. A founding editor of Contemporary Women’s Writing, she is a member of the editorial board of Narrative, which succeeded the Journal of Narrative Technique as the Society’s journal. Many of her seventy plus articles and book chapters contribute to narrative theory and its intersections with feminism, with modernism, with women’s writing, with autobiography studies, psychoanalytic theory and criticism, and with work on globalization and geopolitics, and identity. Her prolific writing career models many of the ways to bring narrative theory into conversation with other ideas and emergent literatures. She has given us new ways of thinking about periodization; gender and genre, migrations, diasporas, and borders; indigenization, cultural encounters and intertextuality, transnational networking, spatiality, and interdisciplinarity itself. A major authority on the poet, novelist, and memoirist H. D., Susan Friedman has also gathered important collections of essays on Joyce and letters to Freud. She has written on a dazzling range of individual writers, from Virginia Woolf and Julia Kristeva to Anna Deveare Smith and Arundhati Roy. She has worked tirelessly to bring recognition and critical attention to writers such as Fatima Mernissi, Tayeb Salih, and Leila Aboulela. Those of you were present at her session on Iraqi women writers and scholars at the Washington, D.C. Narrative Conference will not soon forget Susan’s moving and effective presentation of the narratives of women who were literally trapped in Iraq by the circumstances of war and political instability. Though it was not safe for them to make the trip to Baghdad and the airport, it was characteristic of Susan to have attempted to bring them into our ambit, for she is the most generous of guides and mentors, as many of you present today could attest. It was equally characteristic to confront us simultaneously with a literal barrier and an invitation to connect across that hazardous borderland. In her teaching and her writing, Susan Friedman is a consummate arranger of encounters of people and ideas. If those encounters fracture orthodoxies or demand the revision of concepts we thought we had nailed down, so much the better.
Her book, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter, published by Princeton in 1998, was the recipient of the Narrative Society’s 1999 Perkins Prize for Best Book in Narrative Studies. Joseph Alan Boone wrote of it, “Mappings proposes a thoroughly multiculturalist and geopolitical definition of feminism that significantly expands the theoretical boundaries of feminist theory and that underlines the importance of narrative as a meaning-making process.” Her work on the way stories and cultural narratives serve as a primary mode of thinking about politically explosive question of identity enjoys canonical status in fields that may not even realize they are in conversation with narrative theorists. Today we recognize her work as an ambassador for narrative studies in the wide world of the humanities.
Please join me in celebrating Susan Stanford Friedman as the 2010 recipient of the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award.
-- Suzanne Keen