Worlds of the Prison is a cross-cultural comparison of poems, fiction, and memoirs that represent life in large, open-air, but restricted spaces, such as concentration camps, prison camps, ghettos, and besieged cities. These spaces and the texts that discuss them have played a conspicuous role in the historical consciousness and modern literatures of Eastern and Central Europe, yet little scholarly attention has been paid to the features that connect these texts across national traditions or distinguish them from conventional prison literature. First-person prison-cell narratives generally describe the existential horrors of living in cramped isolation or awaiting execution; they are often meditations on the meaning of justice, and they draw very clear distinctions between the prison and the “outside.” Poems and stories about camps and ghettos, on the other hand, construct a terrifyingly plausible world-within-a-world. Here, the daily lives of captives are a strange imitation of the world on the other side of the wall or barbed-wire fence. Most of the research for this project will occur in the library. Literature about concentration camps and gulags has had an extremely rich and complicated reception, both in Eastern Europe and in the English-speaking world. At this stage of the project, a major goal will be to use library resources to reconstruct the critical reactions and polemics surrounding this literature.

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Student Tasks and Responsibilities:  Locate and retrieve articles and essays responding to key texts in popular and scholarly periodicals. The student will be asked to take an active role in prioritizing which areas of a text's reception history require the most urgent attention.  To locate maps, photographs, and other visual resources relevant to key events and locales.  To engage in an ongoing discussion of how literature and history intersect.