Gerald Prince and Narrative Studies Thomas G. Pavel (bio) By granting Gerald Prince the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award, the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN) made a splendid choice. Prince was one of the first American literary scholars to promote a rigorous structural theory of narrative and create the fundamental tools for such a theory. One of the most striking features of Gerald Prince’s work is its unswerving commitment to conceptual and stylistic clarity. Stylistic, first: all Prince’s books and articles—from his A Grammar of Stories: An Introduction, published in 1973 at the beginning of structuralism’s rise in American literary studies, to his later Guide du roman de langue française (1901–1950), published in 2002, an encyclopedic repertory of more than 450 novels published in French during the first half of the twentieth century—are couched in a limpid, luminous language, always reader-friendly whether the topic is rather abstract, as in the Grammar of Stories, or, on the contrary, the work clearly espouses the most concrete features of the literary phenomena it analyzes. Conceptually, next: Prince is a master of clear thinking because he always targets what is genuinely essential in the literary issues he examines. Quite remarkably, for him what is really essential, conspicuously so, is always what attracts and holds our [End Page 298] attention in our interaction with literature: in brief, what literary works talk about and how they do it. This “what” and “how” encompasses more than just the detailed movements of the text’s surface: it is rather the action as narrated that interests Prince, the content of the story and the way it is organized. before going into more detail, it might be useful to remember that while nowadays ISSN’s annual meetings attract hundreds of scholars—young, mature, or seasoned in an impressive display of intellectual success—about fifty years ago, in the early 1960s, the study of narrative was a far more limited field. Then, even more than now, form was at the center of American literary studies. But both the main object and the methods of study were different. The New Criticism taught at Yale and its many followers considered poetry to be the paradigmatic form of literature. For these scholars the terms “literary work” and “poem” were virtually synonymous and the method of approaching them was through a certain kind of close reading—a careful search for patterns of figural language and their resonances (often resulting in tensions or ambiguities) across the work. Cleanth Brooks’s “The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness” (1947), for instance, offered a beautiful reading of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, treating it as a vast deployment of metaphors and symbols, not unlike a sonnet by John Donne grown wide and wild. Plot and character in Shakespeare’s play were only quickly glanced at, through the stained glass of poetry. One could perhaps argue that the figural formalism of the New Critics at Yale was fertile ground for the later rise of deconstructive criticism. The Chicago School, by contrast, revived the Aristotelian tradition that grants poetics and its general categories the central role in literary criticism. Chicagoans regarded literary language not as the invariant key to meaning but rather as a means towards other ends—the expression of emotions in lyric, the representation of action in drama and narrative, and so on. The Chicago School paid attention to narratives, in particular to the organization of the story in the service of specific effects, as in R. S. Crane’s classic article on the plot of Tom Jones (1952), and to narrative rhetoric, as in Wayne Booth’s influential The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). Like Aristotle, Crane tries to reason back from effect (the feeling that there is something marvelous in Tom Jones’s eventual happiness and the means by which he achieves it) to causes in the construction of the work. Like Aristotle and Crane, Booth engages in means-ends reasoning, contending that evaluations of narrative rhetoric should proceed not by attention to a priori rules (“show, don’t tell”) but by attention to the desirability of the effects it generates within the larger fiction. The...