Newsletter of the International Society for the Study of Narrative

Summer 2014

Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award

 

1. At the Boston Conference last March, the Society conferred the 2014 Booth Award to Hayden White.
2. The 2015 Booth Award winner, selected in our recently adopted process that involves final voting by past winners and past Presidents of the Society, is Tzvetan Todorov.
3. Richard Walsh, our current president, is hereby inviting the membership to submit nominations for the 2016 winner to him by 1 December 2014 richard.walsh@york.ac.uk. Richard, Sue Lanser (1st VP), and Brian McHale (2nd VP) will draw on these nominations as they prepare a list of 5-6 nominees from which the Executive Council will choose the 3 finalists at the annual EC meeting at MLA in early January. Past winners and past presidents will then select the winner from among these 3.

Upcoming Events

1.The 2015 ISSN Conference: March 5-8 at the Swissotel in downtown Chicago, Illinois.

Conference Coordinator is Dan Punday of Purdue University Calumet. Conference is supported by Purdue University Calumet, Northwestern University, Loyola University, and the University of Chicago. Deadline for the submission of proposals is October 15, 2014. For more information about the conference, go here: http://narrative2015.org/index.html

2. Call for Proposals for MLA January 2016

The ISSN Program Committee (Kurt Koenigsberger, Erin McGlothlin, Brian McHale) invites proposals for the Society’s guaranteed session at the 2016 MLA, scheduled for January 7-10 in Austin, Texas. A topic may be proposed by any current member(s) of ISSN, who would also chair or co-chair the chosen panel. Participation on the panel will be open to all members of MLA. Proposals for the ISSN session at MLA 2016 should include a session title and a brief rationale not to exceed one page. Please submit your proposal to Brian McHale (mchale.11@osu.edu) by November 1, 2014. The Program Committee will announce its selection by December 1, 2014.

3. ISSN Elections

The nominating committee—Sue Lanser, Cathy Romagnolo, Paul Dawson, and Jim Phelan—has arranged for the following slate for this fall’s election of officers. More details about our on-line voting procedure, including the deadline for casting your ballots, should show up in your in-boxes before November.
Second Vice-President
Jan Alber, University of Freiburg; Henrik Skov Nielsen, Aarhus University

 

Executive Council #1
Carol Colatrella, Georgia Institute of Technology; Amy Elias, University of Tennessee

 

Executive Council #2
Sue Kim, University of Massachusetts-Lowell; Maria Mäkelä, Tampere University

4. ISSN Panels for MLA Vancouver, January 2015.

 

Narratological Dickens

Saturday, 10 January

5:15–6:30 p.m. Program arranged by the International Society for the Study of Narrative and the Dickens Society

Presiding: Robyn Warhol, Ohio State Univ., Columbus

1. “Dickensian Metaphor as a Narratological Issue,” Monika Fludernik, Univ. of Freiburg

2. “‘Let Us Have No Meandering’: Temporality in David Copperfield,” John O. Jordan, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz

3. “The Friendly Move of Hypothetical Narration in Our Mutual Friend,” Kathleen Pacious, National Univ. of Ireland, Galway
The Limits of Narrative

Sunday, 11 January

12:00 noon–1:15 p.m. Program arranged by the International Society for the Study of Narrative

Presiding: H. Porter Abbott, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara

1. “The Narration and Documentation of War,” Eleni Eva Coundouriotis, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs

2. “The Tragedy of the Commonplace: Failing to Represent the Ordinary,” Lesley Goodman, Macalester Coll.

3. “‘But Why Always Dorothea?’: The Inevitable Trade-Offs of Narrative,” James Phelan, Ohio State Univ., Columbus

Future Conferences:

The 2016 conference will be held in Amsterdam June 16-18. Joyce Goggin, Tara McDonald, and Daniel Hassler-Forest will be the coordinators.

As always, members interested in hosting a future conference are encouraged to get in touch with Alan Nadel amnade2@uky.edu or Jim Phelan phelan.1@osu.edu

Prize Announcements:

2014 Perkins Prize

Srinivas Avaramudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (University of Chicago Press)

2014 Phelan Prize

This year the prize went to the cluster of essays on “Paratexts and Digital Narrative” by Birte Christ, Dorothee Birke, Ellen McCracken, and Paul Benzon, from the January 2013 issue.

Best Graduate Student Paper Prize 2013 (Manchester)

Nathan Shank, University of Kentucky, “Irony as Empathy in Cognitive Narrative Studies”

 

Membership:

To join the Society or renew your membership, simply subscribe to Narrative, the Society’s journal. Here’s a link to the subscription form:

https://ohiostatepress.org/OrderForms/NAR%202013%20Order%20Form.pdf

June 11–June 22, 2012

Application deadline: March 1, 2012

The Project Narrative Summer Institute (PNSI) is a two-week program on the Columbus campus of the Ohio State University for faculty members and advanced graduate students who want to explore the usefulness of narrative theory to their research and teaching. Led by two Project Narrative core faculty members, the seminar meets in the mornings to discuss narrative and narrative-theoretical readings, and participants work in the afternoons on projects they bring to the Institute. A project may be an article, book chapter, presentation, or syllabus. PNSI members form a vibrant and collegial community for sharing ideas about scholarship, writing, and pedagogy.

The 2012 PNSI will be led by Project Narrative core faculty members Frederick Aldama and Sean O’Sullivan. In addition to theoretical readings, texts will be drawn from many narrative genres with an emphasis on comics, film, and television.

Tuition for PNSI is $1200. Participants also cover the cost of their own travel and housing. We encourage participants to seek institutional funding for this professional development opportunity. We can offer information for participants who want to share housing, house-sit, or stay in local bed-and-breakfasts.

Applicants should send a current c.v. and a one-page description of the project they plan to undertake at PNSI to Robyn Warhol via email (warhol.1@osu.edu) no later than March 1, 2012.

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Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award

The Society will present the 2009 Booth Award to Gérard Genette at the annual conference, held in Birmingham this June.  The festivities will include a panel devoted to Genette’s work featuring papers by Seymour Chatman (UC Berkeley), John Pier (Université  de Tours), and Gerald Prince (University of Pennsylvania) as well as the official presentation of the Award at the business lunch on June 6th. (For more information on the Birmingham Conference, see below).

Perkins Prize:

The winner of the 2009 Perkins Prize for best book on narrative studies published in 2007 is Sharon Marcus for Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton University Press).  The Society thanks the selection committee, Gerald Prince, chair, Eileen Gillooly (Columbia) and Dorothy Hale (UC Berkeley).

New Officers

The membership elected the following new officers this fall.

Second Vice-President: Brian Richardson, University of Maryland

Council members:

• Sheila Teahan, Michigan State University
• Susan Lanser, Brandeis University

The Society expresses its warm gratitude to those members of the Executive Council whose terms ended on December 31st:

Past President: Gerald Prince, University of Pennsylvania

Council members:

• Beth Boehm University of Louisville
• Jesse Matz, Kenyon College

Nominations Committee

Suzanne Keen of Washington and Lee University and first Vice-President of ISSN will chair this year’s nominations committee.  The other committee members are H. Porter Abbot (UC Santa Barbara) and Clkaudia Breger (Indiana University). If you would like to nominate someone to serve on the Executive Council, please get in touch with Suzanne at skeen@wlu.edu

Panels for the 2009 MLA in Philadelphia

The Society will sponsor two panels, and organizers of each are currently accepting paper proposals.

"Narrative and Evolution," organized by Tony Jackson of UNC-Charlotte tejackso@uncc.edu  and Nancy Easterlin, University of New Orleans <neasterl@uno.edu>

"Postmodern and Unnatural Narratives," Jan Alber, University of Freiburg <jan.alber@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de>

Future Conferences

We are set for Birmingham, England, June 4-6 this year. The conference coordinators are Dick Ellis and Deborah Parsons, and they are being assisted by Anna Hartnell and Anna Burrels, all of the University of Birmingham.  Plenary speakers will be Frank Ankersmit, David Lodge, and Frances Smith Foster. For more information about the conference go to http://narrativesociety.bham.ac.uk/

The 2010 conference will be in Cleveland from April 8-11. Kurt Koenigsberger and Gary Stonum of Case Western University are the conference coordinators.

The 2011 conference  will be in St. Louis from April 7-10.  Emma Kafalenos and Erin McGlothlin of Washington University are the conference coordinators.

If any member is interested in bringing the conference to his or her institution, please get in touch with Alan Nadel amnade2@email.uky.edu or Jim Phelan <phelan.1@osu.edu>

Narrative

Autumn 2009 will be a special issue, guest-edited by Rebecca Stern of the University of South Carolina, on Temporality. 

The journal and the Ohio State University Press have reached an agreement with a Press in China to publish selected essays in translation as an annual.  The first volume is scheduled to appear within a few months.