Gapper_Book

R. H. Gapper Book Prize 2009

The Society for French Studies awarded the tenth annual R.H.Gapper Book Prize to Alain Viala for La France galante (Presses universitaires de France)

- Celia Britton: The Sense of Community in French Caribbean Fiction (Liverpool University Press)

- Margaret McGowan: Dance in the Renaissance. European Fashion – French Obsession (Yale University Press)

Joe Oakley (Cambridge University): 'Evidence from the history of French provides a strong argument against the idea of typological consistency, thereby threatening the very foundations of linguistic typology.' Discuss.

Annie Tate-Harte (UCL): 'Discuss Michel de Certeau's view that "on n'habite que des lieux hantés", with reference to any two or more of the following: Atget's photography of Paris streets; Nadar's photography of the souterrains of Paris; Chronique d'un été; Le Pont du Nord; La Reprise.'

Moya Samer (Cambridge University): 'Before any feminist politicization, it is important to recognize the strong phallogocentric underpinning that conditions our cultural heritage.' Discuss with reference to Julia Kristeva.

The Society of French Studies is delighted to announce below the results of the 2009 Postgraduate Gapper Essay Prize. The award includes a cash prize of £750 and expenses-paid travel to the next annual conference. Details of how to enter next year’s prize will be available shortly on the Society’s website at http://www.sfs.ac.uk/

‘Skinner in Tandem: Against Methodological “Servitude Volontaire”’ by Tanya Raie Filer (University of Oxford)

Runner-Up

‘The Emperor’s Old Clothes: A Reading of Henri Lopes’s Le Pleurer-Rire’ by Cécile Bishop (King’s College, University of London)

Third

‘Between Ethics and Aesthetics: Samuel Beckett’s Minimalism’ by Lucy Bell (University of Cambridge)

‘The Ambiguities of Gender Representation in Last Year in Marienbad’ by James Hay (Queen Mary, University of London)

‘Parisienne Identities and the Politics of Embodiment’ by Claire Humphrey (University of Manchester)

R. H. GAPPER BOOK PRIZE 2008

The Society for French Studies is delighted to announce the award of the ninth annual R. H. Gapper Book Prize jointly to Mark Greengrass for Governing Passions. Peace and Reform in the French Kingdom, 1576-1585 (Oxford University Press) and Christopher Prendergast for The Classic. Sainte-Beuve and the Nineteenth-Century Culture Wars (Oxford University Press).

Please click here for further details.

POSTGRADUATE GAPPER ESSAY PRIZE 2008

Winner
‘Reading Through Photography: Roland Barthes’s “Proust et la photographie”’ by Kathrin Yacavone (Edinburgh)

Runner-Up

‘Translating Pure Visuality: Heather Dohollau’s Poems on Non-Figuration’ by Clemence O’Connor (St Andrews)

Commendations

‘Le “vrai” moi: Nancy Huston’s Concern for Authenticity’ by Kate Averis (King’s College London)
‘Reading Bourdieu alongside Corneille’s Polyeucte’ by Jonathan Patterson (Cambridge)

2008 UNDERGRADUATE ESSAY PRIZE

Winner

Clodagh Kinsella (UCL): ‘In your view, what is the specific contribution of poetry and/or fiction to the representation of painful experiences?’

Joint runners-up

Adam Strowger (Durham): ‘Addressed throughout as vous, the reader is established as the repository of values antithetical to those espoused in the text’ (C. Davis). Discuss the relationship between the narrator and the reader in the Journal du voleur in light of this statement.

Harald Stevenson (St Catherine's, Cambridge): Théodore de Bèze’s conception of the elegy.

Eric Robertson for his book Arp: Painter, Poet, Sculptor published by Yale University Press. Please click here for further details.

Gabor Gergezy (Exeter) 'Jean-Luc Godard's film essays of the 1960s: the virtues and limitations of Realism theories'

Amanda Dennis (University of Cambridge): 'Perceiving Inside the Virtual: Subjectivity and Film Stills in Merleau-Ponty and Bergson'

Anna Magdalena Elsner (University of Cambridge): 'Tracing the Presence of an Absence - Mourning and Creativity in Les intermittences du coeur'

Maxime Goergen (University of Oxford): 'Esthétique romanesque et éthique des objets dans La Première Education sentimentale '

Lucy Whiteley (University of Glasgow): 'Violence: A Touch of Anxiety Among the Narbonnais?'

Emma Bielecki (King's College London): 'The Role of the Fake in the Discourse surrounding Collecting'

Robert. J Watson (University of Leeds): 'Photographic and Cinematic Treatments of Images of Death and War in Modern and Post-Colonial French Visual Culture'

Awarded to Maria C. Scott for her book Baudelaire’s ‘Le Spleen de Paris’: Shifting Perspectives, published by Ashgate. Please click here for further details.

Catherine Birkinshaw (Warwick): 'Revolutionary Propaganda 1788-1789 (with particular reference to pamphlets)'

Catherine Crimp (King's College, Cambridge): '"The philosophical and critical thought of this period is consistently engaged with the politics of its immediate context; but this engagement is generally so oblique and implicit as to be all but invisible". Discuss'

2006 Postgraduate Gapper Prize

Winner
Luke Sunderland (King’s College, London): ‘A Failed Double Act: Lancelot and Gauvain in the Lancelot-Grail Cycle’

Second Ex-Aequo
Rowan Tomlinson (Oxford): ‘The Mechanics of Seeing and Describing: representing objects in Béroalde de Verville’s Cabinet de Minerve’

Thomas G. Hinton (King’s College, London): ‘What, if anything, is specifically Occitan about Occitan narrative’?

Commendation
Catherine Burke (Cork):‘Butor’s Bleston: a modern-day Acheron’

Roger Pearson, for his book Mallarmé and Circumstance: The Translation of Silence, published by Oxford University Press. More information

Katja Haustein, Trinity Hall, Cambridge, for her essay, 'Vision and Affect in A la recherche du temps perdu'.

Miriam Heywood, University College London for her essay 'Discuss Histoire(s) du cinema in the context of debates around the holocaust and the image'.

Undergraduate Prizes 2005

Winner

Martin Robinson (Nottingham) - 'L'aliénation du Noir n'est pas une question individuelle' (Fanon). To what extent [is] Une vie de boy a fictional representation of this view?

Runner Up

Tom Nolan (Oxford) - It seems strange that so many critics should have found Proust's novel unmoral; the truth is that he was preoccupied with morality [and melodrama]'. Would you agree?

Winner: Sylvia Huot, Madness in Medieval French Literature: Identities lost and found (OUP, 2003)

Winner: Kathryn Rees, Wolfson College Oxford, for her essay 'Moving Forward in Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet'

Suzanne Dow, St John's College Oxford, for her essay 'Reading Dangerously: Lol V. Stein, the Failure of the "Narrator Function" and the Ravissement du lecteur'.

Sophie Oliver, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, for her essay 'Subversive Acts: female voice and performance in the songs of the Trobairitz'.

Maria O'Sullivan, University College Cork for an essay entitled, ' "We shall cease from exploration [...]" ' [Assia Djebar and Kateb Yacine].