The Rutledge Prize 2012: For Graduate Students Giving Papers at the SCLA Conference

Each year the SCLA offers a prize of $100 for the most promising work presented at its annual conference by a graduate student. The essay is also considered for publication in The Comparatist.

You may submit a paper for consideration for this award by sending it as an email attachment to the SCLA vice president. The deadline for submissions is November 15, 2013 with the prizewinner to be announced in the 2014 issue of The Comparatist. Send to: Prof. Adelheid Eubanks, aeubanks@jcsu.edu.

Since conference papers are often shortened from longer projects, students are encouraged to submit an essay-length version of their work that would be suitable for journal publication (no longer than 7,500 words). If publishable, prize essays normally appear in the next issue after the official announcement (i.e., a year and a half after the conference presentation), thus allowing ample time for feedback and advice from the editor.

Rutledge Prize Winner 2012

Melanie East, University of Toronto

"A 'Network of Hopes': The Romance of Gambling in Thomas Hardy's A Laodicean."

Judges' Citation

"Melanie East's essay celebrates the literary imagination as a force that can enchant the world, despite the dominating presence of rationality. East shows that Hardy's A Laodicean rejects the realist novel's tendency to subject the world to its own orders of rationality—plots developing their unmysterious logics of predictable cause and effect, action and reaction. Realism is deliberately undermined by mystery and chance. If Hardy's text stages a scene of gambling, therefore, it is to open a door that lets in all of the forces that make life agreeably mysterious. Life, Hardy seems to say, ought to have its chance encounters, constitute itself as a web, if not a wheel of fortune. The novel ought to have these chances too, permit itself to run a few risks, especially when addressing its favorite topics—the nature of society, and the experience of love. If rationality is allowed to 'tame' chance, lovers would lose the romance of fateful encounter, and novels their opportunity for drama. The social network would lose its essential flexibility and congeal into rigid hierarchy—a dull world, and dull subject matter for a novelist. What Melanie East most powerfully argues, then, via a close reading of Hardy's work, is for a bit of slack in the system, a place made for play and games of chance. It's what makes life worth living. It's what makes Hardy's novel, and indeed Melanie East's essay worth reading—both offer excellent defenses of the literary imagination, and take sensitive pleasure in responding to the enchanted world of fiction."

Harry C. Rutledge, Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and an internationally recognized classicist, was the guiding spirit behind the founding of the SCLA March 28-30, 1974. He served as President, Board Member, and Conference Coordinator, but is best remembered for his enthusiasm in encouraging comparative work of all kinds. He also helped inspire the founding of The Comparatist.