Dear colleagues,

As you know, each year the International Society for the Study of Narrative confers the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award for outstanding contributions to the study of narrative over the course of a career. I am writing to invite members of ISSN to submit nominations for the 2022 winner of the Booth Award. Please send your nominations by November 30th, 2020 to: sylvie.patron@orange.fr (use my private e-mail address instead of replying to the entire list, please).

Our next year’s president Lindsay Holmgren and first vice-president Erin James will collaborate with me on preparing a list of nominees, drawing on your recommendations. From this list, the ISSN Executive Council will identify three finalists. Past winners of the Booth Award and past presidents of the ISSN will then select an honoree from among these three.

The Society gave its first Lifetime Achievement Award to Wayne C. Booth in 2006. Subsequent honorees have been: Gérard Genette, Susan Stanford Friedman, Dorrit Cohn, Seymour Chatman, Gerald Prince, Hayden White, Tzvetan Todorov, Lubomir Doležel, Marie-Laure Ryan, Mieke Bal, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Susan Lanser and James Phelan. The 2022 Award will be formally presented at the ISSN Conference 2022.

You will find more information about the award at: http://narrative.georgetown.edu/awards/booth.php

Thank you for helping us to identify outstanding candidates for the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award.

On behalf of the nominating committee,

Sylvie Patron

It gives me great pleasure to announce the winners of the 2020 ISSN Elections for Executive Council. Our ISSN ballot was populated by an extraordinary, talented, dedicated group of narrative scholars, and from that group these winners emerged:

Second Vice President:

Paul Dawson, University of New South Wales 

Executive Council members:

Alice Bell, Sheffield Hallam University

Marta Figlerowicz, Yale University

Many thanks to our other candidates: Jesse Matz (Kenyon College), Stefan Iversen (Aarhus University), and Pedro Ponce (St. Lawrence University), whose willingness to stand for election is a great sign of the strength of the Society.  Special thanks to this year’s Nominating Committee: Lindsay Holmgren (McGill), chair;  Jan Alber (RWTH Aachen University); Dorothy Hale (Berkeley),  and Robyn Warhol (The Ohio State University), for bringing this outstanding slate of candidates before us.

Please join me in congratulating Paul, Alice, and Marta!

Onward!

Jim Phelan, Distinguished University Professor and Editor of Narrative

Dear members of the International Society for the Study of Narrative,

The Award Committee consisting of the Society’s President Sylvie Patron, Vice President Lindsay Holmgren and Past President Maria Mäkelä is thrilled to announce the winner of the 2021 Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award:

Distinguished Professor James Phelan, The Ohio State University

Phelan has devoted his scholarship to developing a comprehensive understanding of narrative as rhetoric, and his rhetorical poetics has become one of the most influential ways of thinking about narrative as a way of knowing and a way of doing. Starting with his famous definition of narrative as “somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened,” Phelan has, over the course of 10 authored or co-authored books and more than 175 articles, offered new ways of thinking about style, character, narrative progression, first-person narration (reliable and unreliable), and narrative ethics. This work also has led to insightful accounts of broader issues such as genre, authorial agency, the audiences of narrative, and fictionality. Among Phelan’s most important works are Reading People, Reading Plots (1989), Narrative as Rhetoric (1996), Living to Tell about It (2005), Experiencing Fiction (2007), and Somebody Telling Somebody Else (2017). In recent work, he has been contributing to the field of narrative medicine.

Phelan is also a willing collaborator, most recently in Debating Rhetorical Narratology (2020) with Matthew Clark. In addition, Phelan has collaborated significantly with Peter J. Rabinowitz on editorial projects (Understanding Narrative and the Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory, and for twenty-five years, the book series on the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative at the Ohio State University Press) and in a contribution to Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (2012), itself a larger collaboration with David Herman, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol. Phelan has done other important collaborative writing or editing with Henrik Skov Nielsen, Richard Walsh, Brian McHale, Jakob Lothe, Jeremy Hawthorn, Susan R. Suleiman, Robert Scholes, David Richter, Gerald Graff, Faye Halpern, and Sarah Copland.

Phelan’s work as an editor is also extraordinary. He has edited or co-edited ten books on subjects ranging from holocaust narrative to teaching narrative theory. Since 1992, Phelan has edited Narrative, the journal of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, recently ranked #1 by Googlescholar in the category of “literature and writing.” He continues to co-edit the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative book series, now with Katra Byram and Faye Halpern. He is co-founder, along with Frederick Aldama, David Herman, and Brian McHale, and current director of “Project Narrative” at The Ohio State University, internationally recognized as the major center for narrative research in the world.

Phelan is the soul of the International Society for the Study of Narrative: he has served as the coordinator of its first annual conference in 1986, as President in 1989-90, and as Secretary-Treasurer since 2005. In his work with ISSN, he has been a key player in maintaining and developing the international network of narrative scholars. His work in narrative theory has been not only field-shaping, but of incomparable pedagogical value. Additionally, Phelan is a devoted mentor to junior narrative scholars, including those in interdisciplinary narratological arenas around the world.

As always, the shortlist for the Award was compiled by the Award Committee, in collaboration with the Society members and the Executive Council (this year without Jim Phelan). The previous Booth honorees and past presidents of the Society cast the final vote. We wish to thank all of you who sent nominations and took part in the voting!

The honorary panel and award ceremony will take place at our online conference on May 22, 2021 and will be available in perpetuity on our ISSN website (thenarrativesociety.org) for all current and future narrative scholars to learn from and celebrate. The panelists represent the scope and variety of Professor Phelan’s influence and his ability to establish lasting collaboration and mentorship within the field of narrative studies: we are delighted to hear from Peter Rabinowitz, Yonina Hoffman, Brian McHale, Robyn Warhol, and Henrik Skov Nielsen.

Please join us in congratulating Professor Phelan – now and next year in May!

Maria Mäkelä, Past President of ISSN, Chair of the Booth Award Committee

Sylvie Patron, President of ISSN

Lindsay Holmgren, Vice President of ISSN

It is our utmost pleasure to inform the Society that the prize committee, consisting of Catherine Belling, Kent Puckett & Maria Mäkelä has chosen Yogita Goyal’s book Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (NYU Press) for the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award. Altogether 23 titles were nominated among the books published in 2019. The prize recognizes the book that makes the most significant contribution to the study of narrative: http://narrative.georgetown.edu/awards/perkins.php

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Why Runaway Genres?

Powerfully argued, beautifully written, and utterly timely, Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery offers a new and crucial contribution to narrative theory.  Part of its considerable achievement comes from its understanding of the slave narrative not only as an object of study but also as a term of critical art.  Because, in other words, it takes the slave narrative as a portable, instrumental, and resistant narrative form, it offers new ways of thinking about what narrative theory, narratology, and the analysis of narrative genres can tell us about the relation between race, history, and aesthetics.  “Race,” she writes, “has always been entangled with form.”  More than that, Goyal’s treatment of the “global proliferation of the slave narrative” as a way to think through “increasing large-scale migration, the ongoing appeal of sentimentalism to narrate trauma, and a historical tendency to see current events as repetitions of the past” helps us not only to understand the place of politically charged narratives in history or the way that history relies on narrative forms but also to realize how narrative theory as narrative theory can emerge as a vital and urgently comparative contribution to social, political, and historical thinking.  At a moment when many are thinking about how to balance the coherence and considerable critical power of narrative theory with the need to address the ideas, the forms, and the narratives that underwrite the difficult history of the present, Runaway Genres offers new directions for the analysis of narrative while also helping to remind us of the potential narrative theory always had to see, to understand, and, at key moments, to resist both the world as it is and the stories on which that world sometimes relies.

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The award ceremony will take place at our online conference on Saturday, May 22, 2021.

On behalf of the ISSN Executive Council and the Perkins Prize Committee,

Maria Mäkelä

Past President, ISSN

Chair of the Perkins Prize Committee

The memory of Emmett Till continues to haunt, and the malice that motivated his murder is alive and well. All over the world, from Minneapolis to Paris, from Salt Lake City to New York City, from Rio de Janeiro to London and Berlin, the outrageous murders of people of African descent have moved people with antiracist conscience to protest and hold accountable a system that devalues the lives of our African American brothers and sisters. The names of the victims call out for recognition and action. We say their names. Ahmaud Arbery, murdered in Brunswick, Georgia, while on a jog. Breonna Taylor, murdered by police officers in Louisville, Kentucky while she slept in her own home. George Floyd, asphyxiated by police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. These grotesque killings recall a legacy of injustices against people of African descent such as Adama Traoré in France, the victim of police violence. Freddy Gray in Baltimore, Maryland. Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio. Sandra Bland near Houston, Texas. Philando Castile. Walter Scott. Eric Garner. Alton Sterling. Michael Brown. And so many more.

We are outraged at these continued abuses of power, committed by those sworn to protect and serve all of the public. We denounce racial hatred and the violence it incites. We grieve with the victims of such hostility and their families and friends, and our hearts go out to everyone who suffers at the hands of white supremacist ideologies and racist systemic structures. We stand in solidarity and protest with all who want to reform biased systems and help bring about a world free of hatred, discrimination, and prejudice. Those of us with privilege must use it to maximum positive effect. Now, more than ever, it is time to make unequivocal the position that the status quo is intolerable, and that what is insufferable to the least privileged of us is insufferable to us all.

We invite all members of the Narrative Society to recognize the need for action. While we know there is much more work ahead of us, we are proud to state our unity in the position that we are better as an organization when everyone is seen with the same inherent worth, irrespective of culture, creed, nationality, language, gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, and ability. Today, we reaffirm our commitment to social justice. Now is the time to immerse ourselves in narratives and narrative scholarship that can help academia continue to confront its investment in and engagement with systemic racism, and with the systemic failures by which it is bolstered. It will take everyone to change the system for the better, and it will require all forms of response to make it happen. We invite you to consider which responses you want to undertake and to act accordingly. Here is a partial list: to engage in peaceful protest; to educate ourselves more on inequality, privilege, and racism; to incorporate these issues in our teaching and scholarship; to facilitate the sharing and understanding of narratives of resistance and reform; to comfort and support a friend; or to stand up, confront, and denounce hatred when you see it. We invite all of our society members to participate in positive change wherever possible. Together we can be part of the change we need and desire.

The membership of the ISSN has elected the following officers:

Second Vice-President: Lindsay Holmgren, McGill University

Members of the Executive Council:

Dorothee Birke, University of Innsbruck

Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, University of Pennsylvania

Please join me in congratulating them! Please also join me in thanking the other candidates, whose willingness to serve is a sign of the Society’s strength: Thomas Pavel, University of Chicago; Helen H. Davis, Wilkes University, and Aaron Oforlea, Washington State University.

I also want to thank the nominations committee: Maria Mäkelä (Chair), Chris Gonzalez, Karen Kukkonen, Gerald Prince. Finally, a tip of the hat to Eddie Maloney, our Electronics Communications Coordinator, who has once again managed the election with efficiency and grace.

Thanks,

Jim Phelan

Each year, the International Society for the Study of Narrative recognizes a book or books that have made the most significant contribution to the study of narrative. It is my great pleasure, as chair of this year’s Perkins Prize committee, to announce the awards for books published in 2017.

The 2017 Perkins Prize is awarded to The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine, co-authored by Rita Charon, Sayantani DasGupta, Nellie Hermann, Craig Irvine, Eric R. Marcus, Edgar Rivera Colón, Danielle Spencer, and Maura Spiegel, and published by Oxford University Press.

Honorable mention for the 2017 Perkins Prize is awarded to Permissible Narratives: The Promise of Latino/a Literature, written by Christopher González and published by the Ohio State University Press.

The Perkins Prize was established in honor of the “contributions of Barbara Perkins and George Perkins to the development and success of the Society, including the founding of both The Journal of Narrative Technique and the Society itself.” Citations for both books will be read during the Awards Luncheon at the 2019 Narrative conference in Pamplona.

Committee members Marco Caracciolo and Erin James join me in congratulating Rita Charon, her co-authors, and Chris González for their outstanding achievements. I also extend my hearty thanks to Marco and Erin for their intensive engagement with the large number of excellent books submitted for this year’s award and for their thoughtful and collegial deliberations.

Congrats again!

Yours,

Sue Lanser

Dear Narrative Society friends,

The Executive Council of the ISSN is pleased to announce that the 2020 conference has been awarded to Mississippi State University, which will hold the conference at the Intercontinental Hotel in New Orleans from March 5 to 8. Kelly Marsh and Dan Punday will serve as conference organizers.

In addition to Mississippi State as host, The University of New Orleans will be a sponsor (thanks to Nancy Easterlin for her work!), and Kelly and Dan are in contact with some other New Orleans area institutions hoping to line up additional sponsors.

The website for the conference is up at narrative2020.org. Kelly and Dan will have more information about the 2020 conference at the Awards Lunch in Pamplona.

Cheers!

Sue Kim
ISSN Conference Liaison