(Re)Imagining the Prison

This course focuses on literary, creative, and philosophical responses to the prison as an answer to crime and as a means of social control.

We look at the history of state responses to transgression—from corporal and capital punishment to mass incarceration—in order to understand the modern carceral system and how it is represented and reimagined in literature and art.

In surveying fiction, poetry, comics, film, and memoir, we see how writers and artists respond to the challenges of representing carceral time and space: indeterminate sentences and six-by-eight cells, plantations turned into prisons, the death penalty turned into a spectator sport, and speculative worlds without prisons at all.

Readings include authors and thinkers like Michel Foucault, Angela Davis, George Jackson, Varlam Shalamov, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Rachel Kushner, and Jesmyn Ward.