Senior Novel Prizes Announced

Jenny Huth, English department chair, and St. Stephen's English instructors presented the 2017 Senior Novel prizes at a special awards ceremony on Friday, May 12. A capstone research and writing project for seniors, the assignment requires thoughtful reading and in-depth analysis of numerous classic and modern texts, as well as music lyrics and film scripts. Students spend months researching and writing their final senior novel project paper. Congratulations to this year's winners!

Senior Novel Project Awards, 2017
 
The Chimamanda Adichie Storytelling Award: Bijou Kanyambo
"The Impossible Task of Silencing a Single Story"
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Barbara Kingsolver, Poisonwood Bible
Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
Edward Zwick, Blood Diamond
 
The It’s All in Your Head Award: Lisa Schulmeyer
“Doing the Time Warp: Stream-of-Consciousness and What Makes Us Human”
 William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories
Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine      
 
The If You Liked It, Then You Shoulda Put a Novel Project Award on It Award: Ellie Metni
"The Postmodern Condition in Art: When Content becomes Form"
Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Beyonce, Lemonade (album)
 
The Pants on Fire Award : Ivy Zhang
“Honest Liars: Self-Deception as Coping Mechanism”
Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley
Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres
Ian McEwan, Atonement
 
The Beware Alternative Facts Award: Mae Mouritsen
“All’s Fair in Blood and Gore: Literary Representations of the Connections Between Propaganda, Indoctrination, and Violence”
 Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
 Adam Ross, The Orphan Master’s Son
 Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
 Jan Wong, Red China Blues
 
The Civic Awareness Award: Omar Chatila
“Overcoming Post-911 Adversity in the Muslim Community”
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Karan Johar, My Name is Khan
Amin Maalouf, Ports of Call 
John Updike, Terrorist
 
The Let Your Freak Flag Fly Award: Ansley Arnow
"Freak Show: The Rejected and the Rejecting"
Karen Russell, Swamplandia
Toni Morrison, Sula
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Milos Foreman, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (film)
 
Rigor Mortis--Gothic Fiction Award: Felicia Chang
“Sentimentalism and Transgression in Gothic Fiction”
William Beckford, Vathek
Matthew Lewis, The Monk
Anne Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
 
Corporations are Characters, Too: Best Psychoanalysis of Wall Street: Gage Baumli
“Wall Street Dream: American Nightmare”
Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon
Douglas Brunt, The Ghosts of Manhattan
           
The Foot of the Cross Award: Madison Wiedeman
“Decadence: Rebelling Against Victorian Society”
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
J.K. Huysmans, Against the Grain
Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life
W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence
 
The Don’t Believe Everything You Read Award: Dylan Cole
“The Truth Too Bloody For Television: Intersections of War, Fiction, and the Media”
Kurt Vonnegut, Catch 22
Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds
Neil Macfarquhar, The Sand Cafe
Peter Berg, Lone Survivor (film)
 
The Concrete Jungle Where Dreams Are Made of Award: Sydney Rudman
“Only in New York:  Narratives of Foreigners, Fact-Checkers, and Fully-Fledged Freaks Fighting Obsolescence”
Colm Toibin, Brooklyn
Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude
Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City
Martin Scorsese, Taxi Driver
 
The Call is Coming from Inside the Novel Project Award: Jamie Turner
“Narrating Under the Influence: Horror and Point-of-View”
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley
Stanley Kubrick, The Shining
 
The Rebelling With a Cause Award: Nihar Gagneja
“Conformity as a Form of Violence: The Birth, Life, and Death of a Rebel”
E.M. Forster, Maurice
Charlotte Brönte, Jane Eyre
Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
Sam Mendes, American Beauty
 
The “Red, White and the Blues” Award: Jake Baumli
"The American Way: A Pursuit of Misguided Conformity"
Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit
Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Joseph Heller, Catch 22
Joseph O'Neill, Netherland
 
The Home Movies Award: Cate Gilham
"The Suburban System: The Internal Effect on Women due to 1950’s, Cold War Suburbia"
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road,
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Patricia Highsmith, Deep Water
Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows
 
The Most Likely to Become a Dissertation Award: Abbie Sage
“Neither Here Nor There: Iterations of Identity in European Modernist Fiction”
Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September
E.M. Forster, Passage to India
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight
 
The Jetlag Award: Sarika Mullapudi
“Fitting In and Standing Out: Navigating a Hyphenated Identity as a South Asian Immigrant to the Western World”
Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Oleander Girl
Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake
Gurinder Chadha, Bend It Like Beckham
 
The Great American Novel Project Award: Matt Schneider
“The Great American Novel: A Canon for Discerning Identity Through the Ages in America”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
 
The Best Conclusions to the Conclusion of St. Stephen’s English: Taylor Walters
“Breaking the Chain: Radical Islam and the Human Network”
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
John Updike, Terrorist
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Don DeLillo, Falling Man
 
The Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know Award: Kiley Browne
“You Are Mad, for You Are Not like Us”: Defining the Integral Role of Insanity in Society
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted
Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
 
The Innocence Abroad Award: Gracie Coates
“Traveling Abroad: Redefining or Outrunning Reality”
Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
Paul Theroux, The Mosquito Coast
Jennifer Egan, The Invisible Circus
Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
 
The Throwing Shade Award: Caleb Wolfson
“A Fruity Escape: Setting, Escapism and Leading Roles in the Queer Community”
Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
Jeanette Winterson, Oranges are not the Only Fruit
Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle
 
The Shellshock Award: John Sansbury
“Cafes and Trenches: The Lost Generation and World War I”
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun  
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
 
The Sasha Fierce Award: Sydney Starkes
“Okay Ladies, Now Let’s Get in Formation: The Complex Formation of the the African-American Female Identity”
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
Nella Larsen, Passing
 
The Is This the Real Life? Is This Just Fantasy? Award: Delia Stephens
"Napoleon, Don't Be Jealous That I've Been Online Chatting with Babes All Day: An Analysis of Humanity's Use of Media to Escape Reality"
Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
Dave Eggers, The Circle
Davey Wreden, The Stanley Parable (video game)
 
 
Back
Address: 6500 St. Stephen's Dr., Austin, TX 78746
Phone: (512) 327-1213