Studies in English: Prison Literature

Why are so many Americans in prison?  What brought them there?  What is it like there?  And what opportunities are there for incarcerated people? 

Recent years have seen increased attention to the phenomenon of mass incarceration. This course reads and views materials about prison cultures and the writings that they have produced. 

We will contextualize our work by looking at some of the historical and journalistic writing about the history of incarceration in America. This includes parts of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Imprisonment in the Age of Colorblindness and all of Shane Bauer’s American Prison, as well as film and TV productions on this subject, such as the documentaries The Prison in Twelve Landscapes and Thirteenth and the Netflix series Orange is the New Black.  But the bulk of our work will involve literary texts, including poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.  Authors who wrote from jail or prison include Boethius, Marco Polo, Walter Raleigh, Richard Lovelace, Fyodor Dostoyevski, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela; many of our readings will be short accounts. Missouri’s own Chester Himes writes about prison life in his noir fictions.  For longer accounts, we’ll look at the experiences of youth in prison systems, through the novel Nickel Boys, by the contemporary African American author Colson Whitehead; we will read the beautiful novel A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines, which is about, among other things, capital punishment; and we will read the haunting collection of short stories about women’s experience of imprisonment by Patricia McConnel. 

The course will also introduce students to the work of the Missouri Prison Outreach Program (or MO-POP), a new educational program that MU is providing at the Moberly Correctional Center.