2022 Perkins Prize Nominations

Established in 1994, the Perkins Prize honors Barbara Perkins and George Perkins, the founders of both The Journal of Narrative Technique and the Society itself. The prize, awarded to the book making the most significant contribution to the study of narrative in a given year, provides $1,000 plus a contribution of $500 toward the winning author’s expenses for attending the Narrative Conference at which the award will be presented.

The Perkins Prize is conceived as a book prize rather than an author prize. All books on the topic of narrative, whether edited collections, collaboratively written books, or monographs, are eligible to compete. If an edited collection or collaboratively written book is selected, the prize goes to the editor(s) or the collaborators. The winner of the competition for books published in 2020 will be announced at the MLA Convention in Washington, DC, in January 2022, and the prize will be presented at the 2022 International Conference on Narrative in Chichester.

To nominate books with a copyright date of 2020, please send an
email with “Perkins Prize” in the subject line to the chair of the judging committee, Sylvie Patron, sylvie.patron@u-paris.fr. Publisher, third-party, and self-nominations are all appropriate. Copies of books must be sent directly to each of the three judges. Please indicate in the nominating email whether the publisher or the author will send the books. The deadline for receipt of books by the judges is June 1, 2021.

Books should be sent by authors or their publishers directly to each of the three committee members:

Sylvie Patron, Université de Paris, France, personal address: 110 rue des Grands Champs, 75020 Paris, France; sylvie.patron@u-paris.fr.

Liesbeth Korthals Altes, University of Groningen (professor emerita), Netherlands, personal address: Vivienstraat 76, 2582RW Den Haag, Netherlands; e.j.korthals.altes@rug.nl.

Marco Caracciolo, University of Ghent, Belgium, personal address: Bernard Spaelaan 21, 9000 Ghent, Belgium; Marco.Caracciolo@ugent.be.

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

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

2021 Perkins Prize Nominations

Established in 1994, the Perkins Prize honors Barbara Perkins and George Perkins, the founders of both The Journal of Narrative Technique and the Society itself. The prize, awarded to the book making the most significant contribution to the study of narrative in a given year, provides $1,000 plus a contribution of $500 toward the winning author’s expenses for attending the Narrative Conference at which the award will be presented.

The Perkins Prize is conceived as a book prize rather than an author prize. All books on the topic of narrative, whether edited collections, collaboratively written books, or monographs, are eligible to compete. If an edited collection or collaboratively written book is selected, the prize goes to the editor(s) or the collaborators. The winner of the competition for books published in 2019 will be announced at the MLA Convention in Toronto in January 2021, and the prize will be presented at the 2021 International Conference on Narrative in Chichester.

To nominate books with a copyright date of 2019, please send an email with “Perkins Prize” in the subject line to the chair of the judging committee, Maria Mäkelä: maria.makela@tuni.fi. Publisher, third-party, and self-nominations are all appropriate. Copies of books must be sent directly to each of the three judges. Please indicate in the nominating email whether the publisher or the author will send the books.

The deadline for receipt of books by the judges is July 1, 2020.

Books should be sent by authors or their publishers directly to each of the three committee members:

Maria Mäkelä

Faculty of Social Sciences

FI-33014 Tampere Finland maria.makela@tuni.fi

Catherine Belling

Medical Humanities & Bioethics

Arthur J. Rubloff Building

420 E. Superior St., 6th Floor

Chicago, IL 60611 U.S.A.

c-belling@northwestern.edu

Kent Puckett

1248 Yale Avenue

Claremont, CA 91711 U.S.A.

kpuckett@berkeley.edu

Established in 1994, the Perkins Prize honors Barbara Perkins and George Perkins, the founders of both The Journal of Narrative Technique and the Society itself. The prize, awarded to the book making the most significant contribution to the study of narrative in a given year, provides $1,000 plus a contribution of $500 toward the winning author’s expenses for attending the Narrative Conference at which the award will be presented.

The Perkins Prize is conceived as a book prize rather than an author prize. All books on the topic of narrative, whether edited collections, collaboratively written books, or monographs, are eligible to compete. If an edited collection or collaboratively written book is selected, the prize goes to the editor(s) or the collaborators. The winner of the competition for books published in 2018 will be announced at the MLA Convention in Chicago in January 2020, and the prize will be presented in March 2020 at the Narrative Conference in New Orleans.

To nominate books with a copyright date of 2018, please send an email with “Perkins Prize” in the subject line to the chair of the judging committee, Dan Punday: dpunday@english.msstate.edu

Publisher, third-party, and self-nominations are all appropriate.  Copies of books must be sent directly to each of the three judges. Please indicate in the nominating email whether the publisher or the author will send the books. The deadline for receipt of books by the judges is July 1, 2019.

Books should be sent by authors or their publishers directly to each of the three committee members:

Dan Punday

Department of English

Mississippi State University, Box E

Mississippi State, MS 39762

Astrid Ensslin

200 Old Arts 

University of Alberta

Edmonton AB

T6G 2E6

Canada

Paul Dawson

School of the Arts and Media

University of New South Wales

NSW 2052

Australia

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

Established in 1994, the Perkins Prize honors Barbara Perkins and George Perkins, the founders of both The Journal of Narrative Technique and the Society itself. The prize, awarded to the book making the most significant contribution to the study of narrative in a given year, provides $1,000 plus a contribution of $500 toward the winning author’s expenses for attending the Narrative Conference at which the award will be presented.

The Perkins Prize is conceived as a book prize rather than an author prize. All books on the topic of narrative, whether edited collections, collaboratively written books, or monographs, are eligible to compete. If an edited collection or collaboratively written book is selected, the prize goes to the editor(s) or the collaborators. The winner of the competition for books published in 2017 will be announced at the MLA Convention in Chicago in January 2019, and the prize will be presented in June 2019 at the Narrative Conference in Pamplona, Spain.

To nominate books with a copyright date of 2017, please send an email with “Perkins Prize” in the subject line to the chair of the judging committee, Sue Lanser:  lanser@brandeis.edu

Publisher, third-party, and self-nominations are all appropriate.  Copies of books must be sent directly to each of the three judges. Please indicate in the nominating email whether the publisher or the author will send the books. The deadline for receipt of books by the judges is June 1, 2018.