Arab Prison Literature

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course aims to strengthen students’ Arabic reading, listening, and speaking skills while providing them with the knowledge and analytical tools necessary to study Arabic literary texts produced by intellectual prisoners. Students will explore the motives, themes, and stylistic features of prison writing, as well as its mutual relationship with the structures of Arab authoritarian regimes, society, and culture. Prison literature encompasses works written by prisoners either during their incarceration or after their release. It also includes works by authors who were never imprisoned themselves but who drew inspiration from the accounts of others, or who imagined such experiences in order to contribute to this literary tradition. This body of literature spans poetry, novels, plays, short stories, biographies, and memoirs, and serves as a powerful lens through which to examine both the individual experience of confinement and the broader dynamics of repression, resistance, and cultural expression in the Arab world.