The James Phelan Prize for Best Essay in Narrative

The award designates the outstanding essay in each volume of the Society's journal, Narrative. The Award is named in honor of James Phelan, Distinguished University Professor of English at the Ohio State University, who has served as editor of the journal since 1992.

Current Prize Winner: 2023

Chloë Kitzinger, “Disrupted Lines: The Illegitimately Born Narrator in Dostoevsky and Hurston.” Narrative 31.2 (2023): 138-158.

From the Prize Committee: “Developing a bold comparative approach that brings into dialogue 19th century Russian literature and the Harlem Renaissance, Kitzinger's essay centers on illegitimacy as a key trope for novelistic narration. Through the careful close reading of fiction by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Zora Neale Hurston, the essay argues that illegitimately born first-person narrators function as a powerful narrative device that questions authorial control and works towards a utopian vision of literature's embedding in society. Attentive to the authors' socio-cultural positioning as well as style and narrative form, Kitzinger's discussion showcases the potential of a transnational and contextualist narratology.”

Honorable Mention: Matthew Martello, "Dramatic Poetry as Rhetorical Form: The Case of Sarah Piatt’s "Mock Diamonds.'" Narrative 31.1 (2023): 26-48.

Past Prize Winners

2022

Ellen McCallum, “Thinking Through Queer Narrative Forms with Ben Marcus and Renee Gladman.” Narrative 30.3 (2022): 364-387

2021

Aviva Briefel, “Live Burial: The Deep Intertextuality of Jordan Peele’s Get Out.” Narrative 29.3 (2021): 297-320

2020

Lin Li,‘ “To Narrate’—A Verb in the Middle Voice?: Narrativity and Performance in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Ohio Impromptu,” Narrative 28.3 (2020): 289-303.

2019

Tara Menon, “Keeping Count: Direct Speech in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel.” Narrative 27.2 (2019): 160-181.

Honorable Mention: Susan S. Lanser and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, “Narratology at the Checkpoint: The Politics and Poetics of Entanglement.” Narrative 27.3 (2019): 245-269.

2018

Roger Edholm, “The Narrator Who Wasn’t There: Philip Roth’s The Human Stain and the Discontinuity of Narrating Characters” (January 2018

2017

Natalya Bekhta, “We-Narratives: The Distinctiveness of Collective Narration” (May 2017)

Honorable Mention: Katherine Binhammer: "The Story Within the Story of Sentimental Fiction" (January 2017) 

Honorable Mention: Werner Wolf: “Transmedial Narratology: Theoretical Foundations and Some Applications (Fiction, Single Pictures, Instrumental Music)” (October 2017)

2016

Daniel Barlow, “Blues Narrative Form, African American Fiction, and the African Diaspora” (May 2016)

Honorable Mention: Erin McGlothlin, "Empathetic Identification and the Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction: A Proposed Taxonomy of Response" (October 2016)

2015

Eva von Contzen, “Why the Middle Ages Do Not Need the Concept of Social Minds: Exemplarity and Collective Response” (Spring 2015)

2014

Joshua Pederson, “Speak, Trauma: Toward a Revised Understanding of Literary Trauma and Theory.” (Fall 2014)

2013

Birte Christ, Dorothee Birke, Ellen McCracken, and Paul Benzon, “Paratexts and Digital Narrative” (Winter 2013)

2012

Michael Rothberg, “Progress, Progression, Procession: William Kentridge and the Narratology of Transitional Justice” (Winter 2012)

2011

Silke Horstkotte and Nancy Pedri, “Focalization in Graphic Narrative” (Fall 2011)

2010

Yael Shapira, "Hairball Speaks: Margaret Atwood and the Narrative Legacy of the Female Grotesque." (Winter 2010)

Honorable Mention

Molly Hite, "Tonal Cues and Uncertain Values: Affect and Ethics in Mrs. Dalloway." (Fall 2010)

2009

Paul Dawson, "Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction" (Spring 2009).

Honorable Mention

Helena Michie, "Victorian(ist) ‘Whiles’ and the Tenses of Historicism" (Fall 2009).

2008

Lucy Ferriss, "Uncle Charles Repairs to the A&P: Changes in Voice in the Recent American Short Story" (Spring 2008).

2007

Greg Forter, "Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form" (Fall 2007).

Honorable Mention

Dorothy J. Hale, "Fiction as Restriction: Self-Binding in New Ethical Theories of the Novel" (Spring 2007).

2006

Margaret Homans, "Adoption Narratives, Trauma, and Origins" (Winter 2006).

2005

Michael MacDonald, "Losing Spirit: Hegel, Levinas, and the Limits of Narrative" (Spring 2005).