2013 — Gerald Prince
The International Society for the Study of Narrative has great pleasure in honouring Gerald Prince’s most substantial contribution to the field of Narrative Studies by bestowing on him the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award.
In terms of ideas, Gerald Prince’s rigorous theorizing of narrative in its many aspects has informed, inspired and encouraged many other scholars of narrative. The following key areas and concepts were invented or developed in his work: the narratee; the disnarrated; narrativity; narrative grammar; scholarship of the French novel; the art of studying narrative through minimal narratives; postcolonial narrative; narrative and gender.
As Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania, a substantial part of Gerald Prince’s scholarship has been devoted to Francophone narrative. Beyond this field his scholarly output in the field of narrative theory has been tremendous; the textual reference within this theoretical work encompasses the fields of Anglophone and Francophone literatures and beyond.
Gerald Prince is the author of six books and co-editor of four more. His four books in English are:
A Grammar of Stories: An Introduction (1973)
Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (1982)
A Dictionary of Narratology (1987, revised edition in 2003)
Narrative as Theme: Studies in French Fiction (1992)
His books in French are:
Métaphysique et technique dans l’œuvre romanesque de Sartre (1968)
And the two-volume work entitled
Guide du roman de langue française
The first volume of this work, covering the French novel from the years 1901-1950, was published in 2002. He is presently preparing the second volume which spans the years 1950–2000.
Gerald Prince has published approximately one hundred articles in journals, over 50 chapters and encyclopedic entries in books, and over one hundred reviews. His work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Italian, Macedonian, Rumanian and Persian. He has given presentations, plenary lectures and keynote addresses at countless conferences in many different countries - not only in North America and Europe but in China and Turkey. In his contributions in service to the academic profession Gerald Prince has been highly active: he has served on committees in organizations including the Modern Language Association and the American Comparative Literature Association; he was president of the Northeast Modern Language Association in 1985 and he was of course President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative in 2007. He has been the editor of French Forum and has been a member of the advisory board of journals including Diacritics, Poetics Today and Narrative.
Gerald Prince’s qualities and abilities as a fellow academic to us all in Narrative Studies and in academic fields beyond Narrative are tremendous, and I know that many of you will know this from personal experience: he is generous, encouraging and nurturing in his responses to other people’s work – both in individual conversations and in the very constructive and useful but also critically rigorous comments he gives within the discussions in panels at the Narrative Conferences. Both in his written work and in his contributions at conferences, therefore, he has a tremendous gift for facilitating thought and discussion in other academics. His own academic work attains a marvelous combination of rigorous academic focus, argumentation, analytical precision and expressive power coupled with his spirit of lightness, humour and wit which often shines through from underneath the academic precision. In the panel yesterday afternoon to honour his work, the spirit of warmth, gratitude and deep appreciation that met Gerald Prince’s work was a small mirror of his own qualities as an academic and as a person. Yesterday in the panel and today in the formal bestowing of this award honouring his lifetime achievement in narrative studies, he is therefore receiving back in a small portion, in spirit, what he himself has given to Narrative Studies. As a person he is kind, generous, and witty; he has a delightfully warm and gracious spirit; it is always a pleasure to engage in discussion with him on the subject of narrative and on many other subjects. Beyond his outstanding contributions to narrative scholarship and academic service, Gerald Prince is a wonderful person to engage with at a Narrative Conference: he has such incisive wit and observational skills, an admirable calmness, dignity, and gentle authority in his communicational style that conversation with him is both relaxing and stimulating. He is himself an ideal companion to Narrative.
Hilary Dannenberg
International Narrative Conference, University of Manchester, 29 June 2013