Previous Paper Prize WinnersGraduate Student Paper PrizeThe MMLA congratulates the 2024 winner of the Graduate Student Paper Prize: Anika Jensen. Anika's paper, "‘The War is the World’: Theories of Feeling in Women’s Great War Nursing Narratives," applies an affective lens to two texts produced by female relief workers operating out of the same field hospital in France and Flanders during the First World War. She identifies what Sianne Ngai calls "ugly feelings" in both texts—The Backwash of War by Ellen La Motte and The Forbidden Zone by Mary Borden—and considers the social and political ramifications of these feelings, especially as they confront unsustainable expectations of "appropriate" feelings for women during war. Ultimately, she argues that while both authors highlighted different predominant feelings to different ends, both prioritized their felt experiences as essential tools in telling the truth about war. Moreover, she advocates for affect as an essential tool in understanding women's war experiences. The MMLA's Executive Committee states, "Jensen's paper reveals a greater truth behind historical World War I trauma, both seen and unseen, through critical attention to affective dimensions of women’s narratives, inviting a new perspective on this body of work." Anika is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Kentucky. Her dissertation, "Feeling and Experience in American Women's Writing from the First World War," approaches women's First World War narratives through the lens of affect, seeking to uncover their felt experiences with war work and the impacts of such felt experiences on social and political activism. She has articles forthcoming in Tolkien Studies, The Cambridge History of War and Society in America, and War, Literature, and the Arts. She holds an MA from the University of South Alabama and a BA from Gettysburg College.
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Undergraduate Student Paper PrizeThe MMLA congratulates the 2024 winner of the Undergraduate Student Paper Prize: Yiyao Sun. Her paper, "Challenging Polyphony's Role in Addressing Trauma and Mental Stress in Contemporary East Asian Women's Literature," critiques Chi Zijian's novella All Nights in the World for its attempt but ultimate failure to achieve Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of polyphony—the coexistence of multiple, equal voices in a narrative. It highlights the contrasting use of language, where lower-class characters employ natural, metaphorical expressions, while bureaucratic language enforces control and dehumanization. The protagonist resembles feminist confessional poets, maintaining critical distance while recounting personal experiences. Despite aiming to amplify rural women's struggles, the novella paradoxically reinforces their marginalization through the author’s privileged perspective and romanticization of suffering, creating a social distance that undermines its goals. The dominant narrative voice restricts, rather than empowers, the marginalized voices it seeks to elevate, perpetuating systems of suppression. The analysis underscores how well-meaning literary works, in contemporary China, can falter when the author’s social stances and focus on collective trauma dilute the representation of individual women's domestic and mental struggles. Yiyao Sun is a third-year undergraduate student at the University of Chicago majoring in Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century East Asian literature and film, integrating theories of feminist history, modernism, and the avant-garde. She is particularly interested in how narratives and perspectives shape the boundaries between fact and fiction, history and memory, especially in works that seek to address traumatic experiences under social upheavals. Previous Winners
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