Skip to Content

The Horst Frenz Prize Citations 2016

Be it known that Amanda Mazur of Princeton University is the winner of the 2016 Horst Frenz Prize for the best presentation by a graduate student at the annual conference of the American Comparative Literature Association, which, in 2015, was held at the Seattle Sheraton Hotel in Seattle, Washington.

A brilliant and lucid introduction to the practice and theory of Patrick Chamoiseu, a Martiniquean disciple of the theories of Edouard Glissant, who called for a polysemic polylingual medium of fiction, this essays illustrates Chamoiseu's practice of introducing Creole terms so that context and syntax narrow the meaning, and of reversing the hegemonic relationship of what Saussure called "parole" over "langue." A seminal essay.

The judges were particularly impressed by the careful attention in the paper to linguistic detail on the one hand and to the much broader implications she draws from those details on the other. She builds compelling conclusions about creole, dominant (or standard) language and power reversals. This is a wonderful combination of close reading and broad thinking that makes literary analysis useful in our contemporary world. It reveals what literature can do with language itself to create a political rethinking.
 
2016 Frenz Prize Committee:
Eugene Eoyang, Indiana University (Chair)
Kathleen Komar, University of California, Los Angeles
Ron Bogue, University of Georgia