Books, Bodies, and the Bars that Bind Them: A Bibliographic Approach to Prison Writing

1975年，米歇尔·福柯（Michel Foucault）发表了一段著名的言论，他说，到18世纪末，“身体作为刑罚镇压的主要目标消失了”。我提出的博士研究挑战了福柯的基本观点。我认为，当我们研究监狱文本时，我们发现身体——书目的、生物政治的，以及其他方面的——仍然是持续的镇压和强制模式的核心，并构成了对这些统治工具的抵抗。我的研究将探索监狱文本之间的趋同和对比，揭示监狱文本的特殊性——在不同空间内和空间之间运作的文本；身体，风格，时间，地理。本项目以文学文本为研究重点。但是，在我看来，身体文本提供了一个象征性的案例研究，通过它可以更广泛地思考身体与书籍之间的关系。监狱文本的产生和接受取决于作家在监狱里的身体限制。通过考虑一种本质上与具象化经验纠缠在一起的体裁，我接着问：在文学输出的背景下，流通、翻译、编辑干预和促进的过程可能会告诉我们其他背景下书籍的政治？

In 1975, Michel Foucault famously stated that by the end of the eighteenth century 'the body as a major target of penal repression disappeared'. My proposed doctoral research contests Foucault's essential point. When we study prison texts, I argue, we find that bodies - bibliographic, biopolitical, and otherwise - remain central to ongoing modes of repression and coercion - and constitute a locus of resistance to those same instruments of domination. My research willexplore the convergences and contrasts between prison texts, revealing the specificity of the prison text - texts which operate within and between various spaces; bodily, stylistic, temporal, geographic. This project takes carceral texts as its focus. But, as I take it, carceral texts provide an emblematic case study through which to think more broadly about the relationship between bodies and books. The very production and reception of prison texts are contingent on thecorporeal confinement of the writer behind bars. Through considering a genre which is inherently entangled with embodied experience, I go on to ask: what might the processes of circulation, translation, editorial intervention, and facilitation in the context of carceral output teach us about the politics of books in other contexts?