The ESSE Book Awards for 2024 were announced on 26 August 2024 in a ceremony at the University of Lausanne (UNIL), the host of the ESSE 17 Conference. The prizes were given by the ESSE President, Professor Andreas H. Jucker (here with award winners, from left to right: Robert Lawson, Madalina Armie, Pablo Gómez-Muñoz and Arthur Rose).
English language and linguistics
Category B
Daniela Pettersson-Traba. The Development of the Concept of SMELL in American English: A Usage-Based View of Near-Synonymy. De Gruyter Mouton, 2022.
The book represents a thorough, novel and standalone study. Although it addresses the issue of (near) synonymy, which seems to have been a steady concern of various scholars, the book individualises itself through its narrow focus and analysis framework and toolkit, zooming in a very specific topic. The study falls within the scope of lexical semantics, cognitive semantics, historical linguistics, variationist sociolinguistics, pragmatics and corpus linguistics. The research hypothesis and objectives are clearly formulated and map the dataset. Further highlights relate to the large size corpus, systematic, detail-oriented and complex analysis, combined with advanced statistical methods, allowing the author to be reflective and achieve sustainable results. The book lays bare nuances in the language that are otherwise hard to explain. Although the book revolves around ‘pleasant smelling’, it remains exemplary from a methodological perspective, which secures its impact on wider audiences.
Category A
Robert Lawson. Language and Mediated Masculinities: Contexts, Cultures, Constraints. Oxford University Press, 2023.
The book tackles a relevant and hot topic within a well-developed interdisciplinary landscape, combining retrospective and prospective views. The author delves into aspects pertaining to language sociology, sociolinguistics, social semiotics and gender studies. The dataset, made up of several sub-corpora, is authentic and representative, and the combination of linguistic toolkits to conduct the analysis, and thorough theoretical scaffolding are also noteworthy. The book is written in an engaging manner and underpins a coherent structure with attention to research ethics and stance. The book may be considered a remarkable example of solid data-based research on the influence of language in shaping our social fabric, showcasing the role of language in society and deftly interpreting a wide variety of results. Readers, be they linguists or non-linguists, are likely to immerse in this captivating and enlightening book that should travel far beyond the researcher’s desk.
Literatures in the English language
Category B
Madalina Armie. The Irish Short Story at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century: Tradition, Society and Modernity, published by Routledge in 2023.
In this comprehensive study Madalina Armie explores the interaction between short fiction and Ireland’s social and political environment from the 1990s, during the rapid economic growth known as the “Celtic Tiger,” to the aftermath of the economic crash in the late 2000s. Learned and rigorous, Armie’s book provides numerous original perspectives on a large corpus of short stories by a wide selection of contemporary writers, both recognised and emerging, including Claire Keegan, Julia O’Faolin, William Trevor, Colm Tóibín, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Elaine Walsh, Mary Costello, Anne Enright, Emma Donoghue, Kevin Barry, Roddy Doyle and Gerard Donovan. The book skilfully balances historical detail with an in-depth analysis of themes such as morality, gender, Irishness, religion, social expectations and multiculturalism. Armie makes a broader contribution by exploring how interdisciplinary Irish studies can enhance understandings of social change. Written in a clear, crisp and accessible style, Armie’s work will benefit any scholar interested in Irish fiction, the short story and contemporary Ireland.
Category A
Jonathan P. A. Sell, Shakespeare’s Sublime Ethos. Routledge, 2022.
Thisis an ambitious study of the nature of the Shakespearean sublime and its facticity. It describes itself as an “opening bid” on its theme, an “initial foray”. In fact, it is remarkably expansive in its overview of “replotting” of Early Modern “alerting” of the sublime and its refracted reception in eighteenth-century scholarship, and beyond; finely resolved in its close reading of Shakespeare’s writing; and coolly self-positioned in distancing itself from “the Sublime critics” while acknowledging a range of Shakespearean criticism it is happier to align itself with. The main thesis is that “the topical matter, contents, staging, form and shape of the plays collaborate to create a sublime ethos or mood in the audience that predisposes them mentally and emotionally for the experience of sublime pathos”. Sell rereads figures like Plato, Longinus, Boethius, Bruno, Spinoza, Leibniz and Deleuze in order to motivate his propositions on the phenomenal sublime, the experiential sublime and sublime simulacra in Shakespeare. The book carefully demonstrates throughout the involvement of Shakespeare’s sublime in the “finite”, the “flesh”, the “instant”. Many scholarly threads, from the textual to the new-historical and stage/performance history are bracingly drawn together. At the same time, we are encouraged to think beyond Shakespeare, about the very nature of the sublime in relation to beauty and perfection, and about historical/critical categories such as the Enlightenment, the Baroque, and Romanticism. This book and its companion, Shakespeare’s Sublime Pathos, are works that many will want to return to, and dwell upon, for a long time.
Cultural and area studies in English
Category B
Pablo Gómez-Muñoz. Science Fiction Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Futures, Cosmopolitan Concerns. Routledge, 2023.
Science Fiction Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Futures, Cosmopolitan Concerns by Pablo Gómez-Muñoz is an impressive example of the intensive work that the research group Cinema, Culture & Society at the University of Zaragoza in Spain has been carrying out for many years under the direction of Professor Celestino Deleyto. It is a well-written and excellently argued discussion of twenty-first-century science fiction cinema in relation to complex topics such as transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. Gómez-Muñoz demonstrates the relevance of carefully selected and broadly representative films, such as Elysium (Blomkamp 2013), In Time (Niccol 2011), 2012 (Emmerich 2009), The Host (Niccol 2013), Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same (Olnek 2011), and Cloud Atlas (the Wachowskis and Tykwer 2012), in the aforementioned contexts by offering close analyses of a wide range of film techniques. The author is aware of the restrictions of a sf cinema that mainly comes from the US and raises awareness for the development of a more cosmopolitan sf cinema in languages other than English. The book is reader-friendly in terms of length and comprehensiveness and provides refreshing new knowledge in a field often overlooked by scholars.
Category A
Arthur Rose. Asbestos – The Last Modernist Object. Edinburgh UP, 2022.
This is an ambitious, original approach to matters of literary representation which involves an ethical, and even a personal, testimonial commitment to the appreciation of the larger implications of the literary issues at stake. Rose’s aim in writing his book – “to use literary criticism to think seriously about asbestos’s use” – offers a real challenge to its readers: The problematics of asbestos is seen not merely as a motif in 20th- and 21st-century literature, film and visual culture – during and after modernism – but also as the crux of social and scientific matters. Rose’s analyses “alert us to intersections between asbestos and larger issues related to mass migration, climate change, plastic proliferation, racial injustice and toxic legacies.” This study is very closely argued and rich in critical insights, and it places Anglo-American modernist literature in a broad international perspective with a range of reference which is important, surprising and eye-opening. A fantastic read for everyone interested in material intersections between modernism and the environmental and health humanities.