The Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award

This award recognizes outstanding scholar-teachers who have made sustained contributions to narrative studies over the course of their careers.

2024 - Monika Fludernik

Monika Fludernik is a scholar whose work is as prolific as it is insightful, original, and capacious. She has contributed major research to fields that include narrative and narrative theory, linguistic approaches to literature, law and literature, postcolonial studies, eighteenth-century aesthetics, and American literature. Her book Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (Routledge, 1996), which won the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Prize in 1998, offers up a root and branch reformulation of classical narratology from the perspective of sociolinguistics and cognitive theory. In this ground-breaking reconceptualization of narrativity, Fludernik uses the notion of “experientiality” to develop a general model that applies to all narratives. But in this book and beyond, she never loses sight of the specificity of individual narratives, periods, or genres. Her research has also attended to narratives in connection with the experiences of the marginalized and oppressed, in prison or postcolonial narratives, for example. Upon its publication, critics celebrated Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology as “tak[ing] narratology by the scruff and giving it a vigorous shaking,” such that “no one will come away from this book feeling under-nourished.” Fludernik continues to shake up narrative studies, publishing widely and brilliantly on topics as varied as you/we narration, cognitive narratology, fictionality, and narrative factuality. She has made vital, ongoing contributions to the study of free indirect discourse as a linguistic phenomenon from medieval literature to contemporary fiction, offering a pragmatic framework for identifying alterity that is nonetheless grounded in rigorous grammatical analysis. 

Her work has influenced scholars working in a range of fields from the history of the novel to current social media practices. She currently holds an endowed chair position as Professor of English at the University of Freiburg, where she also directed the graduate program, “Factual and Fictional Narration.” She has also previously held a teaching position at the University of Vienna and received fellowships from the Centre for Advanced Studies at the University of Freiburg, Harvard University, the Institut d’Etudes Avancées, the National Humanities Center, and the University of Oxford. She currently serves on the editorial boards of Style and Language and Literature, among other journals, and de Gruyter’s Narratologia: Contributions to Narrative book series. 

2023 - Hortense J. Spillers

Former President of the ISSN (Presidential tenure: 2000-2003), Spillers is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor and Distinguished Research Professor, Emerita at Vanderbilt University. A scholar of the African diaspora, she is known for her essays on African American literature, especially her influential and frequently anthologized essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Her writing has been collected in Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003, and Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, a collection edited by Spillers published by Routledge in 1991. 

She has held positions at Haverford College, Wellesley College, Emory University, and Cornell University, and her work has been recognized with awards from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. In 2013, she was the founding editor of the scholarly journal The A-Line Journal, A Journal of Progressive Commentary. She has received the Nicolás Guillén Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association and the Alumni Achievement Award from Brandeis University. In 2022, the Pembroke Center at Brown University exhibited her papers in “Hortense Spillers: A Life Recorded,” with an accompanying symposium, “The Nicknames of Distortion: A Hortense Spillers Symposium.”

Some of her major contributions include the following:  

• “Formalism Comes to Harlem.” Black American Literature Forum 16.2 (Summer 1982): 58-63.

• “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” diacritics 17.2 (1987): 64-81.

• Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Edited by Hortense J. Spillers and Marjorie Pryse. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1985

• Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text. Edited with introduction by Hortense J. Spillers. New York: Routledge, Chapman, and Hall: 1991

• Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, Spring 2003. 

Robyn Warhol is a College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of English at the Ohio State University. After 26 years at the University of Vermont, she joined Ohio State’s English department and Project Narrative in 2009. Author of Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1989); Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Popular Forms (2003); co-editor, with Susan S. Lanser, of Narrative Theory Unbound (2015), which won honorable mention for the ISSN Perkins Prize for most significant contribution to narrative theory; and co-editor, with Helena Michie, of Love Among the Archives: Writing the Lives of George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), which won the North American Victorian Studies Association’s Best Book of the Year for 2015, Warhol has significantly shaped the interventions of feminism and gender studies in the world of narrative theory. She also has been a Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Study and an Einstein Fellow at the Free University of Berlin’s Kennedy Institute for North American Studies. Warhol served as president of the ISSN in 1993, has co-organized Project Narrative for most of the past 11 years, has attended very nearly every ISSN conference for the past three decades, and is a generous scholar and mentor, serving on committees, reading manuscripts, supervising students, and developing digital approaches to seriality that significantly contribute to knowledge mobilization in the field of narrative theory. Indeed, her current collaborative project is a website, “Reading Like a Victorian,” (victorianserialnovels.org), which makes it easy to read serial installments of Victorian novels alongside installments of other novels that were appearing in the same “serial moment,” or month and year. With Zara Dinnen she is co-editing the new Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories.

As always, the shortlist for the Award was compiled by the Award Committee, in collaboration with the Society members and the Executive Council.

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. He has collaborated significantly with Peter J. Rabinowitz on editorial projects (Understanding Narrative and the Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory, and for 25 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 10 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 a co-founder 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.

Susan S. Lanser is Professor Emerita of English, Women and Gender Studies, and Comparative Literature at Brandeis University. Born in 1944, she received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin. As she said in an interview, “[her] interest in narratology was overdetermined: by [her] passion for writing fiction, by [her] fascination with fictional form, and by the critical moment in which narratology and feminism were both emerging as academic projects” (Narrative Theory and Poetics: 5 Questions, 2012). A pioneer in the field of feminist narratology since her 1986 article “Toward a Feminist Narratology,” she is the author of The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction (1981) and Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (1992, Chinese translation, 2002), which are now considered important classics of the discipline.

Along with her investments in narratology and feminist studies, she has a strong interest in eighteenth-century Europe. In this area, she has published Letters Written in France by Helen Maria Williams (with Neil Fraistat, 2001) and The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic 1565-1830 (2014, winner of the Joan Kelly Prize in Women’s History and runner-up for the Louis Gottschalk Prize in Eighteenth-Century Studies), in which she reverses the typical trajectory of the history of sexuality: “instead of asking, for example, what we can learn about sexuality from the eighteenth century, I ask what we can learn about the eighteenth century from (representations of) sexuality. I look for ideas, tropes, and textual patterns that connect sexual representation to larger concerns of the times” (Diacritics, 2016).

Susan S. Lanser has also published widely in specialized journals and collective volumes, and she has coedited two books: Women Critics 1660-1820: An Anthology (Folger Collective on Early Women Critics, 1995) and Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions (with Robyn Warhol, 2015). Her contribution to the last book is significantly titled “Toward (a Queerer and) More (Feminist) Narratology” and establishes a dialogue, after more than thirty years, with her 1986 manifesto. She advocates the importance of extending the corpus of narratology and of developing a historical narratology. She is also deeply interested in what she calls the politics of form and is currently working with Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan on the formal elements of Palestinian and Israeli narratives. She has directed during ten years the journal Feminist Studies and has been President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN, 2015) and of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS, 2016).

Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan is Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she held the Renee Lang Chair for Humanistic Studies. Born in 1942, she received her Ph.D. from the University of London and has held visiting professorships at Harvard University and the University of Helsinki. She is the author of The Concept of Ambiguity, the Example of James (1977), A Glance Beyond Doubt: Narration, Representation, Subjectivity (1996), and most notably of Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics(1983, revised 2002), which remains one of the most widely used and valued introductions to narratology. She has also published widely in journals that include Critical Inquiry, Narrative, New Literary History, Poetics Today, Partial Answers, and Literature and Medicine and she has edited two books, Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature (1987, newly reprinted as a “Routledge Revival”) and Rereading Texts/Rethinking Critical Presuppositions (co-edited in 1997 with Leona Toker and Shuli Barzilai).

Rimmon-Kenan is credited not only with articulating core concepts in narratology but with refining them. In showing how narratology can apply to a wide range of texts and how texts may themselves be understood as narrative theory, Rimmon-Kenan has demonstrated the value of a reciprocal epistemology. She has also made pioneering interventions in narrative understandings of space and place, subjectivity, narrative level, repetition, the interface between narrative and psychoanalysis, and the narratological insights to be gained from studying the problems and specificities of illness narratives.

Rimmon-Kenan’s current work explores narrative as a nexus between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. She is also engaged in a long-term project with Susan S. Lanser to explore narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a narratological lens. She was elected in 2013 to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, comprised of one hundred of Israel’s most distinguished scholars.

Born in the Netherlands in 1946, and educated at the Universities of Amsterdam and Utrecht, Mieke Bal is Emeritus Professor of Literary Theory at the University of Amsterdam. A prolific writer, editor, and film- and video-maker, she has pursued four or five scholarly careers. Early in her career she left an indelible mark on narrative theory, publishing crucial articles on topics including narrative embedding, mise-en-abyme, and above all focalization, the conceptual basis of which she single-handedly transformed. Intended as a friendly amendment to Genette’s foundational theory of narrative discourse, Bal’s revised account of focalization provoked a heated rebuttal from Genette himself, and the question of focalization remains open and contentious to this day. This first phase of Bal’s intellectual career culminated in the classic summa of narrative theory, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (in French, 1977; English translation, 1985), which she revised and expanded in 1997, 2009 and 2017.

In her next phase, she ventured into the minefield of biblical criticism, equipped with the tools of narrative theory but also, more provocatively, with a set of feminist questions and critiques. The result was a quartet of controversial books about narratives of women and gender in the Hebrew Bible: Lethal Love(1987), Murder and Difference (1988), Death and Dissymmetry (1988) and Loving Yusuf (2008). Equally bold was her shift into art history and visual-arts criticism, including her monographs Reading “Rembrandt” (1991), Quoting Caravaggio (1999) and Louise Bourgeois’ Spider (2001).

In recent years she has become a video artist and film-maker, exhibiting a series of documentaries on migration and collaborating with Michelle Williams Gamaker on three theory-inflected feature films, Mère Folle (2012), Madame B. (2014) and Reasonable Doubt (2016), on the life of René Descartes; all three have also been exhibited in the form of gallery installations. An energetic institution-builder, she developed the Visual and Cultural Studies PhD program at the University of Rochester and helped found the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis.

Born in Switzerland, and educated at the Universities of Geneva and Utah, Marie-Laure Ryan has worked as a software engineer and independent scholar for most of her career. Her publication record extends over thirty-five years. All told, she is the author of five monographs and more than 100 articles, the guest editor of special issues of Style and Poetics, and editor or co-editor of five volumes, including the landmark Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (co-edited with David Herman and Manfred Jahn). 

In her book Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory, which won the 1991 MLA prize for independent scholars, she expanded possible worlds theory to include, in each fictional world, the alternate possible worlds that characters create in their minds – the fictional world as they perceive it, as they predict or hope or fear it will be. No doubt the most indispensable contribution of this book is her principle of minimal departure, which stipulates that readers will imagine fictional worlds as being as close as possible to the actual world, apart from deviations from the actual that are expressly mandated by the text itself.

Ryan’s Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media, the winner of the 2001 MLA prize for comparative literary studies, complements her earlier work on possible worlds, first, by analyzing our experiencing of fictional worlds as a continuum from immersion to interactivity, and second, by considering the effect of medium on our experiencing of fictional worlds. She revisited these topics in Narrative as Virtual Reality II (2015), updating her thinking by responding to developments in both interactive media and narrative theory since 2001. In Avatars of Story (2006) she returned to digital media, this time analyzing forms of storytelling developed for the new media. Her most recent book is Narrating Space, Spatializing Narrative (2016), co-authored with Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryahu.

In addition to her work on print and digital narratives, Ryan has published four edited collections that explore narratives represented in a variety of media: Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling (2004); Intermediality and Storytelling (coedited with Marina Grishakova, 2010); Storyworlds Across Media (co-edited with Jan-Noël Thon, 2014); and The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media (co-edited with Lori Emerson and Benjamin J. Robertson, also 2014). Ryan is currently working (with Alice Bell) on a new collection called Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology. 

Born in 1922, Lubomír Doležel, is one of the most distinguished literary theorists of the 20th and 21st centuries. During his career he published seven influential monographs (four in English, three in Czech) and at least ninety articles, edited or co-edited three collections, and is the subject of four Festschrifts. One of the founders of possible worlds theory, he was the first (in an article in Poetics Today in 1980) to apply J. L. Austin’s concept of performative language to fiction. Like the “I do” of the marriage ceremony, which, when spoken in the appropriate circumstances, gets people married, the statements of an unidentified narrator, Doležel perceived, bring the fictional world into being.

This origin explains why a fictional world is knowable in a way that our world is not: whatever the unidentified narrator says is, is (unless contradicted within the text), and is not subject to evidence from outside the text. Doležel develops the epistemological effects of this theory for fiction in Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (1998), his best-known book. His earlier Occidental Poetics (1990) selects and describes milestones in the development of a poetics over two millennia. Because Doležel’s grasp of literary studies is so thorough that he can discern the elements of each theory that influence subsequent theories, his study offers fresh insight into aspects of earlier theorists’ work that have proven most valuable.

In his latest book in English, Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage (2010), he returns to possible worlds theory to argue that the possible worlds of fiction and the possible worlds of history differ—in their origins and also in their cultural functions and semantic features. Still active and full of innovative ideas, he has yet another monograph, this one in Czech, forthcoming this year. ISSN is happy and proud to grant Lubomír Doležel the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award.

Born in Bulgaria in 1939, Tzvetan Todorov studied under Roland Barthes in the 1960s and quickly established himself as one of the pre-eminent French structuralists. His Grammaire du Décameron (1969) begins to lay out a “narrative grammar” that he elaborated in subsequent work. Poétique de la prose (1971) breaks further ground in parsing narrative elements and remains one of the most widely cited works of narratology. Todorov also elucidates distinctions between two forms of detective fiction (“whodunit” and “thriller”) that have remained foundational. These early books, as well as essays published in such journals as Poétique and Diacritics, strongly influenced subsequent contributions like Genette’s Discours du recit, Gerald Prince’s Narratology, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s Narrative Fiction, and the possible worlds theories of Lubomír Doležel and Marie-Laure Ryan.

Todorov’s work on the fantastic (1975) has shaped critical understanding of the supernatural as narrative and has influenced the formation of unnatural narratology. His Mikhail Bakhtin, principe dialogique (1981), intervened at an important stage in the history of narrative theory to help effect the turn toward a “postclassical narratology” concerned with ideology as well as form. If Todorov’s more recent work on colonialism, race, Enlightenment, and modernity has foregone an explicit narratological focus, narrative texts remain methodologically prominent in such books as Les morales de l’histoire (1991) and La fragilité du bien (1999). His own practice of the “récit exemplaire” allows him to think philosophically through narrative strategies. Todorov thus continues to show us how narrative makes meaning in the modern age.

Born in Bulgaria in 1939, Tzvetan Todorov studied under Roland Barthes in the 1960s and quickly established himself as one of the pre-eminent French structuralists. His Grammaire du Décameron (1969) begins to lay out a “narrative grammar” that he elaborated in subsequent work. Poétique de la prose (1971) breaks further ground in parsing narrative elements and remains one of the most widely cited works of narratology. Todorov also elucidates distinctions between two forms of detective fiction (“whodunit” and “thriller”) that have remained foundational. These early books, as well as essays published in such journals as Poétique and Diacritics, strongly influenced subsequent contributions like Genette’s Discours du recit, Gerald Prince’s Narratology, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s Narrative Fiction, and the possible worlds theories of Lubomír Doležel and Marie-Laure Ryan.

Todorov’s work on the fantastic (1975) has shaped critical understanding of the supernatural as narrative and has influenced the formation of unnatural narratology. His Mikhail Bakhtin, principe dialogique (1981), intervened at an important stage in the history of narrative theory to help effect the turn toward a “postclassical narratology” concerned with ideology as well as form. If Todorov’s more recent work on colonialism, race, Enlightenment, and modernity has foregone an explicit narratological focus, narrative texts remain methodologically prominent in such books as Les morales de l’histoire (1991) and La fragilité du bien (1999). His own practice of the “récit exemplaire” allows him to think philosophically through narrative strategies. Todorov thus continues to show us how narrative makes meaning in the modern age.

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.

The International Society for the Study of Narrative is delighted to confer its Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award on Seymour Chatman. We are fortunate to have Seymour here today to accept this award in person.

By honoring Seymour Chatman with the Lifetime Achievement Award, the Society recognizes first of all the foundational contribution his work has made to the discipline of narrative theory. By this estimation, the brilliance and impact of Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (1978) is the achievement of a lifetime and beyond. Story and Discourse is one of those rare books whose vision and execution is so potent and provocative as to have been instantly influential and to have remained profoundly generative. Putting into relation lines of inquiry developed in structural linguistics, narratology, and Russian and Anglo-American formalist theories of fiction, Story and Discourse forwards its own original theory of narrative structure even while it brought the field of narratology into a new stage of articulation through a brilliant act of synthetic imagination. What is more, Story and Discourse’s high lucidity and unfailing wit, the literary examples drawn from every century and from all the major western literary traditions, and the dazzling micro-readings of specific films and novels, immediately distinguished it as the book of theory that even non-theorists were eager to read. Story and Discourse has by this point in time been firmly established as one of the primary texts of “classic narratology.” One can simply not imagine the field taking shape without it, nor can one imagine the field going forward without reference to it.

But to review Seymour’s scholarly activity from 1956 (when he received his PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) to his retirement in 1993 as Professor of Rhetoric and Film at the University of California, Berkeley is also to follow the career-long habits of critical inquiry, theoretical creativity, and professional engagement that helped create a scholarly world in which books like Story and Discourse could matter. Tracing the abiding interest in problems of language, form, style, and structure that led early in his career to the study of meter, poetics and Milton’s “participial style”(1968); and tracking the leap to his study of fictional forms via The Later Style of Henry James (1972)—we find that such breakthrough turns in Seymour’s thinking are first performed in symposia that themselves have become landmark events along with the volumes of essays that resulted from these gatherings. These include the controversial 1971 Literary Style: A Symposium; the 1973 Approaches to Poetics from that year’s English Institute; the 1974 Proceedings of the First International Congress on Semiotics, edited with Umberto Eco; and the watershed special issue of Critical Inquiry, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell and published as On Narrative (1981). The excitement and consequentiality of the arguments collected in these volumes attest both to the rigor of the intellectual exchange at those meetings and to the strength of the professional community that could push their debate with one another into disciplinary transformation.

That Seymour has been at the center of such turning points for the field reflects, of course, the value placed upon his work throughout his career. But his active participation in such communities is also constitutive of the way he works. As a theorist, Seymour seeks not to invent ex nihilo but to move a collective project forward. Some of Seymour’s most famous ideas come out of his desire to repair or improve the ideas of fellow narrative theorists. We might think in this regard of the refinements that Seymour has made in our understanding of point of view, taking us beyond Genettian focalization with concepts such as “slant” and “filter”; or of his defense of Booth’s implied author, revisioned as detached from Booth’s ethical agenda. But it is also part of Seymour’s openness to intellectual exchange that he good naturedly enters into debate with theorists who are hostile to the project of narratology—and in reading his replies to, say, “contextualist” or deconstructivist attacks on the field, one appreciates how Seymour gives the best account he can of what these critiques might be, even as he delineates their limits and finds new ways to reiterate the value of structuralist narratology.

In Story and Discourse and Coming to Terms (1990) as well as a host of articles, Seymour seeks to theorize deep narrative structure as something belonging to a variety of media and not just to linguistic forms. Working with film as literary fiction’s visual other, Seymour has provided both a general account of Narrative and particular accounts of what is distinctive to cinematic and literary narrative forms. In focusing on the “salient, controversial, or difficult” in narrative structure, he has given us terms that have been especially useful in accounting for the narrative innovations of modernists like Woolf and Joyce and avant-gardists like Robbe- Grillet. The difficulty that Seymour has always loved in literature and that drew him to Milton and James seems to have met its match in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. Seymour’s book-length engagements with Antonioni, including Antonioni: The Surface of the World (1985) and the beautiful Michelangelo Antonioni: The Complete Films (brought out by Taschen) have given us not only a lexicon for understanding the particular aesthetic effects and ideological investments of Antonio’s oeuvre, but also concepts such as cinematic description and “contingent narration” that add to the theoretical understanding of film as a narrative medium.

Seymour has, happily, worked out many of his ideas through his active participation in the Narrative Society. He was a plenary speaker at the first official Narrative Conference in 1986 and appeared in the pages of the first issue of Narrative. In 2003, he helped organize the annual conference at Berkeley. He has been in between and beyond a regular contributor to the society and to its journal. Always moving forward, Seymour’s recent essay “Backwards,” an investigation of the narrative structure of reverse chronology narratives, appeared in Narrative in 2009.

Through the publication with Macmillan of his Reading Narrative Fiction (1992) as well as other edited volumes, Seymour also has opened the study of narrative to a audience of general readers and nonprofessional students. As a dedicated and inspiring teacher at Berkeley for over 30 years, he brought narratology from the Parisian center to the Pacific rim. But in the classroom, the end of high theory is for Seymour to give his students a finer-grained understanding of textual meaning. We see this pedagogic concern raised as the ultimate stake at the close of his introduction to Story and Discourse: “It is at the “reading out’ level that occurs the problems of the elementary literature class, where students understand the meaning of every sentence in isolation but cannot make any sense (or any satisfying sense) out of the whole narrative text.” Thanks to Seymour’s work, narrative text as a whole could begin to be thought, and students could know what to do with it.

The award our Society presents today joins the roll call of honors that Seymour has already received: the Fulbright, ACLS, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and NEH. But it is with a special sense of gratitude for his particular contribution to both the study of Narrative and to this Narrative society that we today confer on Seymour Chatman the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award.

The International Society for the Study of Narrative is delighted to confer its Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award on Dorrit Cohn, who would have enjoyed being here, but is unable to join us today.

Dorrit Cohn’s work on the rendering of consciousness in fiction concisely laid out in Transparent Minds has been foundational for much of the subsequent development of narratology; terms like psycho-narration, dissonant and consonant self-narration, and autonomous monolog are useful to our work more than thirty years after Cohn proposed them. Similarly, Cohn’s insistence on the borderlines between fictional and non-fictional discourse spawned an indispensable vocabulary. To the story/discourse dichotomy, Cohn introduced the “referential” plane and the “data base” outside the text proper to which that plane refers. She has been a superb interlocutor for other major narratologists, most memorably and productively for Gérard Genette and Franz Stanzel.

Dorrit Cohn is a superior reader of texts. She has given us unforgettable readings of authors we thought we knew and introduced us to several we might never have encountered otherwise. Indeed, her probing of the Molly Bloom monolog, her tracing of the narrator’s moves into and out of various characters’ consciousness in Mrs. Dalloway, her explanation of the appearance of K. have changed forever how we read Joyce, Woolf, and Kafka. Those readings are rendered in an English that is as elegant as it is clear.

For colleagues and students, Cohn’s integrity is legendary. She never promised something she could not deliver, and she always followed through with what she promised. Her talents as an editor and translator of others’ writing have been preciously treasured by the beneficiaries.

For her decades of service to the profession and for the many intellectual gifts she has given us, the Narrative Society gratefully bestows its Lifetime Achievement Award on Dorrit Cohn.

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 Techniqueas 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.

The International Society for the Study of Narrative is delighted to confer its 2008 Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award on Gérard Genette. 

Genette’s rich, stimulating, and trailblazing examination of narrative in works like “Frontiers of Narrative,” Narrative Discourse, and Narrative Discourse Revisited made him narratology’s preeminent figure. We are all indebted to the concepts, tools, and terms he devised and elaborated—from homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrative to iterative frequency or metalepsis—and much present narrative inquiry would simply be inconceivable without his contributions. An outstanding narratologist, Genette is also a dazzling critic who pioneered literary structuralism and who has given us superb readings of Proust, Flaubert, Robbe-Grillet, and many others. He is a brilliant theorist of genre, who defined and elucidated mimology, a brilliant student of the palimpsestuous character of (narrative or nonnarrative) literary texts and of the form and force of paratextual elements, a brilliant aesthetician who has illuminated the nature and function of artworks. Most generally, as his Figures series exemplifies, he has been an indefatigable explorer of the space between signifier and signified, expression and meaning, text and thought.

Just as much as the remarkable paths he has opened and the remarkable results he has achieved, Genette’s very manner is admirable. His ability to integrate knowledge while questioning received thinking, to combine close reading and theoretical farsightedness, to trace synchronic configurations as well as diachronic deployments, to interrogate not only the extant but also the possible, as well as his gift for joining method and openness, rigor and playfulness, esprit de finesse and esprit de géométrie are everywhere manifest in his work. They make him an incomparable critic, narratologist, and poetician.

For over fifty years Gérard Genette has met the highest standards of intellectual activity. The Narrative Society is proud to give him its Lifetime Achievement Award.

The International Society for the Study of Narrative bestows its first Lifetime Achievement Award on Wayne C. Booth, who sadly passed away in the interval between the Executive Council's decision to give him the Prize and this year's conference.

Wayne spent his scholarly career pursuing two intellectual passions, narrative and rhetoric, and, beginning with his monumental first book, The Rhetoric of Fiction, he succeeded in bringing them together in what we call today the rhetorical theory of narrative. Indeed, for Wayne, there was no real division between his books on rhetoric and rhetorical criticism such as Modern Dogma and The Rhetoric of Assent (1974), Critical Understanding(1979), and The Rhetoric of Rhetoric (2004) and his books on literature, especially narrative, such as The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), A Rhetoric of Irony (1974), and The Company We Keep (1988). Rather, he saw both rhetoric and narrative as ways of thinking, and he thought more deeply and more influentially about the interrelations between those ways than anybody else. In the course of his inquiries, he developed many tools of narrative analysis that theorists, critics, and teachers of all persuasions have found indispensable. Indeed, such terms and concepts as implied author, unreliable narrator, and stable irony are so much a part of our lingua franca that we frequently use them without attribution.

But Wayne's contributions to our field go beyond what any listing of his books or any litany of the implements he's added to the narrative theory toolbox can convey. Wayne also modeled an exemplary mode of conducting intellectual inquiry and, in so doing, inspired many of his students to carry on in that mode even as he became a wonderful ambassador for narrative studies. Wayne viewed all his work as work in progress, because he valued intellectual inquiry for its ability to generate as many questions as it answered. Thus, Wayne regarded The Company We Keep, his 1988 book on the ethics of fiction, not as his response to the emerging ethical turn in literary studies, but rather as his effort to revisit and revise the answers he gave to questions about "the morality" of fiction 27 years earlier in The Rhetoric of Fiction. And he always spoke at and attended conferences, including many of those of the Narrative Society, with the goals of looking for new ideas and challenging his own thinking. He encouraged his students, many of whom are here today, to conceive of their own work in the same way, to test it not according to its degree of adherence to any particular theory (even his own) but rather according to its ability to meet the more general standards he advocated in Critical Understanding. Those standards are vitality, the extent to which the work contributes to the life of the scholarly community; justice, the extent to which the work is scrupulous and responsible in the execution of its methods; and understanding, the extent to which it contributes to our knowledge and appreciation of other minds.

Wayne was influential not only because of his wide learning, his intellectual depth, and his argumentative rigor, but also because of his generosity of spirit. In his books, he worked to create an implied author his readers would genuinely want to meet—and we know from our own experiences teaching his texts that he succeeded. In his life, he worked to create a real person who would live up to that image: a man who was as self-deprecating and whimsical as he was wise, profoundly skeptical of professional pieties, and profoundly interested in other people and what they had to say. His commitment to undergraduate education was unflinching, largely because it was grounded in the joy he received from listening to what college students had to say. More generally, as For the Love of It made clear, his professional life was paradoxically grounded in a commitment to amateurism: his sense that literature is a gift (wonderfully exemplified by the youthful Booth's joy at being accepted into the Book of the Month Club); his sense that music (or literature) is always greater than the performer (or critic); his sense that art is something one must aspire to, not conquer; most of all, his belief that conversation is more important than competition.

Because Wayne Booth met these standards so well for so long, the Narrative Society is proud to give him its first Lifetime Achievement Award. For the same reasons, the Narrative Society is proud to announce that hereafter it shall call this prize the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award.