To view the official announcement of the 2008 Norton Scholar’s Prize competition, click here.
Established upon the 75th anniversary of W. W. Norton & Company, the Norton Scholar’s Prize is awarded annually for an outstanding undergraduate essay on a literary topic.
The Norton Scholar will receive a cash award of $2,500. The Norton Scholar's nominating instructor will receive transportation to the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association.
Four runners-up will each receive a cash award of $1,000.
Click here to view or download a PDF of the announcement.
All essays become the property of W. W. Norton & Company, and will not be returned. In addition, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., reserves the right to reprint essays for promotional or educational purposes.
“Nation-making and Movie-making”: Cinema in Midnight’s Children
Helen Cespedes
Barnard College
Kathryn C. Fore
University of California, Irvine
"Directitude? what's that?": A Verbal Blunder and Unstable Identity in Coriolanus
Garth Kimbrell
University of Kansas
The Communal Space Between: Reconciliation in Emerson’s "Experience"
Rachel Banner
Oakland University
The Opacity of Evil: The Turn from Theodicy in The Winter’s Tale
Matthew Valdiviez
University of New Mexico
Reading Alcibiades as an Appropriative Self
Boris Rodin Maslov
University of California, Berkeley
Rachel and the Household Gods: An Interpretation of Genesis 31
Susannah Rutherglen
Yale University
In Others’ Words: Michelle Cliff’s Epigraphical Black Atlantic Structure
Erin McMullen
Ball State University
"Rapine Sweet": The Rape of Proserpina and Eve’s Fall
Jessica Bulman
Yale University
The Fantasy of Orality in Absalom, Absalom!
Caleb Smith
University of California, Berkeley
"I will live content elsewhere": The Importance of Exile in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney
Andrzej Niekrasz
St. Louis University
© 2005, W. W. Norton & Company