FFS 380 - Prison Writing/Writing Prison

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

What does literature have to say about the experience of incarceration? Why do incarcerated people turn to fiction to document their experiences or to otherwise express themselves? Why is the French- reading public so hungry for these accounts? The history of French literature is full of acclaimed writers who wrote from prison: Madame Roland, Voltaire, the Marquis de Sade. The twentieth century is particularly rich in texts from and about life behind prison walls. Indeed, in Surveiller et punir, Michel Foucault posits that the prison is one of the hallmarks of modernity because of the way it reconfigures, reimagines and redeploys the power of the State. As twentieth-century France saw a violent transition from a colonial to a postcolonial period, the prison also represents a lens through which to consider state power as it continued both to confine and to circulate bodies in post/colonial geographies. In this course we read and analyze literary texts written by and about incarcerated people in the 20th century, attending to the role of post/de/colonial dynamics as they are thematized in the texts, and as they generated this type of literary production. Authors may include Albert Camus, Jean Genet, Albertine Sarrazin, Joseph Andras. Anne Brancky.

Prerequisite(s): Two units of 200-level work above FFS 212 or equivalent, or with permission of the department.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS