Mass Incarceration and the Literature of Confinement

(Cross-listed with VMS 145, TCS 145, CVS 46, and AMER 145) The Literature of Confinement will be run as an Inside-OutTM class composed of Tufts (“outside”) students and incarcerated (“inside”) students in equal numbers and taught at the prison in Shirley, MA. Together we will ask: How have writers from different historical periods, regions, cultures, and genders (for example, Frederick Douglass, Henrik Ibsen, James Joyce, Lorraine Hansberry, Suzan-Lori Parks) understood experiences of confinement and freedom? What are some of the effects on human beings of different kinds of confinement – economic, educational, legal, physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and social? How do these texts also help us understand various forms of resistance? A weekly focus on engaged interactive learning across cultural, social, and literal barriers in addition to the regular practice of self-reflection through journal writing and creative writing assignments will enable students to develop a qualitative knowledge about power and possibilities in the face of social injustice and structural inequalities. This course aims to facilitate expanded literacy, widely defined, as well as learning about deep differences while also enabling the creation of bonds between people through shared acts of interpretation and imagination.