Incarceration Nation: The Literature of the Prison

Course Description

This course explores the literature by and about prisoners from 600 AD to the present. In addition to reading a variety of sources written across the centuries, we will help current-day prisoners in the production of their own autobiographical writings.  Interdisciplinary in nature, this course weaves together the study of gender, criminology, psychology, sociology, and, most notably, literary analysis of groundbreaking, provocative material written by one of the more neglected, silenced, but all-too-critical sectors of our population-- the prisoners.