Module Identifier ENM7220  
Module Title LITERATURES OF CAPTIVITY  
Academic Year 2007/2008  
Co-ordinator Dr Helena Grice  
Semester Intended for use in future years  
Next year offered N/A  
Next semester offered N/A  
Other staff Professor Timothy S Woods  
Course delivery Seminars / Tutorials   5 x 2 hour seminars  
Assessment
Assessment TypeAssessment Length/DetailsProportion
Semester Assessment 1 x 5000 word essay  100%
Supplementary Assessment Resubmit the failed element.  100%

Learning outcomes

On successful completion of this module students should be able to:
demonstate a knowledge of the key debates that explore and surround the literature of imprisonment;;

review and summarize contemporary debates about philosophical and literary issues concerning aesthetic representations of atrocity;

formulate advanced responses to complex literary texts and well definned literary-philosophical 'problems' using appropriate literary and theoretical arguments

Aims

This module aims:
1. To familiarise students with several crucial areas where literature has engaged with the implications of imprisonment for writers;
2. To investigate the role of the writer in the struggle for human rights, considering the relationship between writing and rights, and the extent to which prisoners of conscience can best express and protest their situation in literary representation.
3. To consider different forms of writing that have emerged from different historical and geographical sites of imprisonment.

Brief description

In response to a history of human rights abuses in recent centuries, writers from Frederick Douglass to Alexander Solzenhitsyn, Nelson Mandela to Viclav Havel, have spoken out against such acts, and served to draw the world's attention to the abuses of its peoples. This module will explore the role of the literatures of captivity in the struggle for human rights, focussing upon such areas of interest as the literature of slavery and abolition; representations of the Gulag; the Holocaust; Japanese American internment; memoirs of Communism; memoirs of northern Korean labour camps; and African national struggles for independence. The module will consider how imprisoned writers represent the tortured body, how many of these narratives turn to querying the construction of the past and the workings and function of memory in their representation of history, and how these narratives insistently return to themes that illustrate the aesthetic problem of reconciling normalilty with horror, the displacement of consciousness of life by the imminence and pervasiveness of death and torture, and the constant violation of the coherence of the self. Many of these writers raise issues to do with aesthetics: can torture be represented 'aesthetically'? How can physical traumas performed on the body be represented in writing? Can one speak about an 'aesthetics of incarceration'?   How do literary aesthetics intersect with gross violations of human rights, and how can the power of the imagination conjure up images when a writer is confronted with the dilema of converting into literature a history too terrible to imagine?

Content

Seminar Programme
1. African American Slave Narratives
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845)
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) extracts

2. Japanese American Internment Narratives
Mine Okubo, Citizen 13660 (1946)
Joy Kogawa, Obasan (1981)

3. Holocaust Reflections
Primo Levi, If This is a Man
Taduesz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1959)

4. Anti-Communist Narratives: China and North Korea
Jung Chang, Wild Swans (1993)
Guo Sheng, The Tears of the Moon (2003) extracts
Kang-Chol Hwan, The Aquariums of Pyongyang (2001)

5. African Improsonment Narratives
Wole Soyinka, The Man Dies: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka (1972)
Albie Sachs, The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (1966)

Module Skills

Problem solving This will be developed and assessed in the preparation for seminars and in the assessment tasks  
Research skills This will be developed and assessed in the preparation for seminars and in the assessment tasks  
Communication Students' writing in an academic context will be developed and assessed in the coursework. Oral skills will be developed in individual and group work in seminars, but not assessed.  
Improving own Learning and Performance This will be developed and assessed in the preparation for seminars and in the assessment tasks  
Team work This is built into the pedagogyof teh module - all students will work in pairs and/or groups to comment on issues in relation to texts, and make seminar presentations  
Information Technology Students will be strongly encoraged to present their work in word processed form (and will edit PC generated text); they will also be requried to make use of computerized library resources  
Personal Development and Career planning This will be addressed in the module's emphasis on independent and group work, and its attempt to develop professional presentational skills  
Subject Specific Skills Advanced research skills in specific areas of sepcialist literary study  

Reading Lists

Books
** Recommended Text
(1995.) The Oxford history of the prison :the practice of punishment in western society /edited by Norval Morris, David J. Rothman. Oxford University Press 0195061535
Caruth, Cathy (1996.) Unclaimed experience :trauma, narrative, and history /Cathy Caruth. Johns Hopkins University Press 0801852463HBKALKPAPER
Creef, Elena Tajima (2004) Imaging Asian America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body New York UP
Davies, Ioan (1990) Writers in Prison Blackwell
Eaglestone, Robert (2004.) The Holocaust and the postmodern /Robert Eaglestone. Oxford University Press 0199265933
Ellman, Maud (1993) The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing and Imprisonment Virago
Grice, Helena (2007) Asian American Fiction and History: International Encounters Routledge
Grice, Helena. (2002.) Negotiating identities :an introduction to Asian American women's writing /Helena Grice. Manchester University Press 0719060303
LaCapra, Dominick (1994) Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma Cornell UP
Langer, Lawrence (1975) The Holocaust and Literary Imagination Yale UP
Millett, Kate. (1994.) The politics of cruelty :an essay on the literature of political imprisonment /Kate Millett. Viking 067085641X
Ong, Aihwa (2003) Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, The New America University of California Press
Scarry, Elaine. (1985.) The body in pain :the making and unmaking of the world /Elaine Scarry. Oxford University Press 0195036018
Vice, Sue (2000.) Holocaust fiction /Sue Vice. Routledge 0415185521
Woods, Tim (2007) African Pasts: History and Memory in Aftican Literature MUP

Journals
Jacobs, J.U (1991) Kanapipi Confession, Interrogation and Self-Interrogation in the New South African Prison Writing 13/1-2/115-127.
Lovesey, Oliver (1995) Research in African Literatures Chained Letters: African Prison Diaries and "National Alegory" 26/4/31-45.
Roberts, Sheila (1985) Ariel South African Prison Literature 16/2/61-73.

Notes

This module is at CQFW Level 7