The Prison in Literature

Catalog description

This course investigates the origins of the prison in early America to better understand the ongoing crisis of mass incarceration in the United States. We will read the earliest writings of incarcerated people in England and colonial America alongside depictions of the prison in a variety of literary genres. Over the course of the semester, we will visit the Rare Books Room and develop skills working with early modern, transatlantic materials in archives. Satisfies the LTRQ Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major. Other topics: ENG 380- Studies in African American Literature Instructor Gill-Sadler This course explores how U.S. imperialism has been and remains a central and urgent concern of African American literary culture and history. The course considers how African American literature has both challenged and reified U.S. imperial rule, what literary methods African American literary figures employ to address and theorize the relationship between Blackness and empire, and what values, politics and aesthetics emerge when we reconsider African American literary history through the question of empire. ENG 380 - Archives and Afterlives in American Literature Instructor Rippeon ”The past,” Emily Dickinson cautions, “is such a curious creature.” This course examines how that curious creature, particularly Dickinson’s own nineteenth century, persists into the present We’ll take up this question by reading primary literary and social texts from the era, including poetry, fiction, essays and lectures, and contemporaneous news media, and examining how these have more recently been adapted, extended, and/or appropriated not only in literary texts but also other popular genres in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. In the course of our work, we’ll consider how these latter engagements with such seemingly distant…