prison narratives link

Sun Nov 11 19:01:51 UTC 2012

Dear Sealanguids,

Sorry it took me a while, but I got so many responses on my initial "prison
narratives" inquiry, that I decided to wait a bit for a complete list.
Here it is below.  I did not sort it -- Russian and East European
literature is mixed up with world literature and non-fiction essays and
articles.  At the bottom you will find a couple of links to lists of prison
narratives (and I took liberty of putting a link to Rebecca Gould's blog on
such narratives below as well).  I hope this will be useful to those who
might ever consider teaching a course in a correctional facility.  I'm
taking one (as a student) right now and without any doubt for me, this has
been the most enjoyable and enlightening educational experience yet.  I
recommend it, as we say, with unqualified enthusiasm.  Again, thank you all
for your wonderful suggestions.  If you think of something else that you
consider important but is not present here, please write to:
xrenovo at gmail.com and I will forward it to Seelangs.

All best,
Sasha.

 *Prison Narratives (unsorted list)*

Dina Rubina, "Kontsert po putevke obschestva knigoliubov" in "Advanced
Russian: From Reading to Speaking", ed. and compiled by Sophia Lubensky,
Irina Odintsova.

Karim Zaimovich, “Episode #18 of ‘Joseph and His Brothers’”
http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/episode-18-of-joseph-and-his-brothers

Vladimir Nabokov, *Invitation to a Beheading*

Viktor Herman, *Coming Out of the Ice*

Angela Davis, "Are Prisons Obsolete?"

Irina Ratushinskaya, “Grey is the Color of Hope”

Er Tai Gao, *In Search of My Homeland*

Primo Levi, *Survival in Auchwitz* or *The Drowned and the Saved*,
especially the chapter "The Gray Zone"

Henryk Sienkiewicz, “The Lighthouse Keeper”*
*

Kobo Abe, *Woman in the Dunes*

Sergei Dovlatov, *Zone*

Anton Chekhov, *Sakhalin*

Fyodor Dostoevsky, *Notes from the House of the Dead*

Elene Bassuk's article "The Rest Cure"

Loic Waquant's "Prisons of Poverty" or a chapter from "Urban Outcasts".

Avi Steinberg, *Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison
Librarian*

Erving Goffman, *Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients
and Other Inmates*

Anton Chekhov, “The Bet”

Solzhenitsyn “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”

Brendan Behan's play *A Quare Fellow*,

Evgeniia Ginzburg's *Journey into the Whirlwind*

Stephen King, “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”

Leonid Andreev, “Seven Who Were Hanged”

Victor Hugo “The Last Day of the Condemned Man”

Alicia Partnoy "The Little School"

Leona Toker. "Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors."
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999

Loic Waquant's "Prisons of Poverty" or a chapter from "Urban Outcasts".

Erving Goffman's work "Asylums" on total institutions.

Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry stories: "Gedali," "My First Goose," "The Rabbi's
Son"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago: the chapter "The Ascent"

Selections from Mikhail Zoshchenko's *Nervous People*

The first few chapters from Emma Goldman's *My Disillusionment in Russia*

Nikolai Gogol's "Diary of a Madman"

Ivan Turgenev's "The Living Relic": imprisonment in a body

Franz Kafka's "Before the Law"

Vaclav Havel's Audience; the chapter “Public Enemy” from Disturbing the
Peace, Open Letters

Karel Capek's "The Last Judgment": A criminal-murderer ends up at the Last
Judgment only to learn that it's not God who judges but fellow humans.

Tadeusz Borowski *This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen*

Boethius "Consolation of Philosophy"

Eldridge Cleaver *Soul on Ice*

Manuel Puig *Kiss of the Spider Woman*

Charlotte Perkins-Gilman “The Yellow Wallpaper”

Films:  “Kholodnoe leto 53-go,” “Hunger”

e. e. cummings, "The Enormous Room"

Jan Beneš “Druhý dech” (Second Breath)

1. *Vasyl Stus* and his prison diaries called* "Z taborovoho zoshyta" *which
were published in *The Idler *in 1986 in English, and are available through
this link (the very last link in capitals if you do not read Ukrainian):
http://www.stus.kiev.ua/

2. *Mykhailo Osadchyi* and his book about prison called "Bil'mo" or *Cataract
(1976)*, which is available in English through a translation done by Marco
Carynnyk. If this is too long, the chapters read well separately, and you
can easily choose one chapter, or even half of a chapter for a lot of rich
material.

Arthur Koestler's *Darkness at Noon*

Vladimir Korolenko's stories.  The most well-known is "Yashka."

Electronic links:

*Amazon list of prison narratives*:
http://www.amazon.com/Prison-Literature-Writings/lm/1WUOQ8OCFJ7SW*
*

*Stanford Prison Experiment*: http://www.prisonexp.org/links.htm

*Salford University Centre for Prison Studies*:
http://www.sucps.salford.ac.uk/*
*

*Rebecca Gould’s blog on prison narratives*:

http://cltlblog.wordpress.com/2010/06/16/a-prison-literature-reading-list-medieval-and-modern/#more-1698

A piece published about one such course and The Death
of Ivan Ilyich was part of it:
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Grounded-Curriculum-Part/133663/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/376443?uid=3739936&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101322159111

 Christina Boufis “Teaching Literature in Prison”
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:cSZVQAZat_EJ:www.greatbooks.org/fileadmin/pdf/TCR_1.1_Boufis.pdf+teaching+literature+in+prison&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjuESgVQilvvYNVHNxKb0pq37SDaR5YBTLIx9nMTzv33F9x_qjje5DF-37c6sbABJA3jYfGZvieYsVzDlxqaJG4ON2jPxmSWib6Ld11VRw088JOYaVvgkiUz48SB7RvjG5lNzOd&sig=AHIEtbRtt4p39KiliJjCAdbUmwemRDJW1Q

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