The period between 1820 and 1865 coincided with a vigorous – and sometimes heated – debate in Britain about the role of the prison in the country’s criminal justice system. It was during these years that incarceration emerged as the central response of the country’s legislators and policymakers to punish convicted criminals. The emergence of the prison did not go unchallenged, however; nor was there agreement among reformers on just what these new institutions should look like. Indeed, a considerable source of the heat noted above came from rivalry between different groups of reformers concerning how the new prisons should function. Today’s paper focuses on one of those rival factions within the prison reform movement, which favoured what was known as “the separate system”. For the supporters of separate confinement, many of them fired by evangelical Christianity, penal isolation – and the introspection seen as its concomitant – was a formidable tool of reform, allowing prisoners, in time, to be stripped of their delinquent propensities and re-shaped as useful, upright members of the community. In short, prison had the power to bring emancipation. A study of three leading “separators” of the period will reveal that while some remained blind to the mounting evidence of the mental and physical cost for prisoners of prolonged cellular isolation, others struggled to reconcile these dangers with the purported benefits. The results of these debates would have a profound impact on the experience of imprisonment in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.
Continuer la lecture de « Neil Davie :”Emancipation behind bars? British prison reform and the chimera of reformative isolation, 1820-1865″ »Auteur/autrice : Alice Braun
Freeing the soul from alienating sins – an analysis of edifying stories about executed convicts in 18th-century English texts and sermons.
Texts about convicts sentenced to death in 18th-century English prisons show how sin was considered as a sign of alienation from the social and religious community. Specific sermons were written on the matter in order to show those prisoners what was at stake for them when facing divine judgement, using repentance as a central argument for emancipation from sin. Those sermons were then published in order to create edifying stories which were supposed to show what would happen to anyone sinking into a life of crime. I will focus on an argumentative analysis of those works and others – confessions and letters – to point out their moral, religious and philosophical dimension, as well as some of their limits, while setting them in the context of the debate about capital punishment in 18th-century England.
Continuer la lecture de « Freeing the soul from alienating sins – an analysis of edifying stories about executed convicts in 18th-century English texts and sermons. »Fabienne Moine : ‘Songs in the Night’: pratiques poétiques dans les workhouses à l’époque victorienne
La grande majorité des documents relatifs aux workhouses proviennent des sources officielles. Mais l’exploration récente d’écrits de résidents, comme les lettres de plainte, et de productions littéraires, telles certaines autobiographies, modifie le regard porté sur la vie dans les workhouses et ainsi remet en cause la capacité de cette institution à réduire les pauvres au silence. Les poèmes des résidents sont une autre source peu analysée jusqu’à maintenant, principalement parce qu’ils sont rares. Les pratiques poétiques des résidents des workhouses permettent d’explorer les différents rapports que les indigents entretiennent avec le pouvoir institutionnel.
Continuer la lecture de « Fabienne Moine : ‘Songs in the Night’: pratiques poétiques dans les workhouses à l’époque victorienne »Delphine Cadwallader: Wilkie Collins, les souris et les femmes
La médecine aliénante et la fiction émancipatrice au XIXème siècle en Grande Bretagne – discutante : Claire Deligny
Cette intervention s’intéressera à la façon dont la littérature sert de révélateur du discours médical sur les aliénés à l’époque victorienne et propose une thérapie, non pas au mal qui frappe différents personnages (féminins), mais au traitement médical qui les aliène encore davantage. La médecine, en d’autres termes, est considérée par certains comme dangereuse, nocive, comme un pouvoir inquiétant. Elle enferme, par sa nosologie et ses choix de traitements, les patientes dans un abyme de non sens et de perte d’identité. Seul le récit, de soi ou de l’autre, semble alors à même de retisser tous les fils de la personnalité écartelée de ces patientes.
Continuer la lecture de « Delphine Cadwallader: Wilkie Collins, les souris et les femmes »Elise Brault-Dreux : “there is poetry / all over the walls of oncology / and i want to get out” (Sarah Broom)
Presentation
I will be presenting a selection of 20th– and 21st-century British poems that all relate an experience of the hospital.
Grounded in the philosophy of care, the study of my corpus of poems rests on three interrelated aspects that are at the heart of hospitalization: as soon as he or she enters this so peculiar space, the patient’s social status is jeopardized; this social vulnerability is combined with a primarily physical experience, and with an intense ontological trial. And however one considers hospitalization (in its social, physical, or ontological dimensions), at some point or another it involves a feeling of alienation: the reduction to the sole status of a patient alienates the individual’s social identity; pain, treatment, alteration contribute to a feeling of physical alienation; and the end of the illusion of eternal health that is more or less violently revealed when one arrives in hospital gives way to an intense feeling of ontological alienation.
Continuer la lecture de « Elise Brault-Dreux : “there is poetry / all over the walls of oncology / and i want to get out” (Sarah Broom) »Nicolas Boileau : Woolf’s feminisms – peace, freedom and subjection
Abstract
In the following presentation, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is analysed as a text that paradoxically shows Woolf’s resistance to feminist ideas. This presentation revolves around an ongoing project on women’s resistance to feminism that is being carried out at Aix-Marseille University. The question raised in the Women and the F-word project is: how can we account for women’s reluctance or refusal to be identified as feminists? What feminism, or what aspect of feminist ideas, is targeted by women covertly opposing it? By returning to Woolf’s text, Nicolas Pierre BOILEAU argues that the place of Woolf’s resistance is in her authorial stance and her enunciation, for the author does not oppose the patriarchal institution only, but all discourses which she relentlessly seeks to challenge.
Continuer la lecture de « Nicolas Boileau : Woolf’s feminisms – peace, freedom and subjection »Jean-Jacques Lecercle : “Aliénation/émancipation de/par la langue”
Le séminaire accueille cette semaine Jean-Jacques Lecercle, professeur émérite de l’université Paris Nanterre.
Résumé
La communication vise à transporter, par traduction culturelle, les trois termes cadres du séminaire (émancipation, aliénation, dialectique) dans les termes d’une philosophie du langage centrée sur la dialectique de l’interpellation et de la contre-interpellation, avec pour objectif ultime une défense et illustration de l’anglistique en tant que discipline unitaire, au cœur de la quelle se trouve la stylistique.
Continuer la lecture de « Jean-Jacques Lecercle : “Aliénation/émancipation de/par la langue” »Frédéric Regard : « Emancipation, autorité, énonciation : leçons de l’histoire de l’esclave Mary Prince »
Nous accueillons cette semaine Frédéric Regard au sujet de son travail sur le récit de l’ancienne esclave Mary Prince (1788-1833)
Résumé
Lorsqu’en 1831 paraît en Angleterre The History of Mary Prince, l’effet est considérable. Ce n’est pas seulement qu’il s’agit du premier récit autobiographique d’une femme noire, c’est surtout que l’ouvrage révèle au public anglais la réalité de la vie des esclaves aux Antilles, déclenchant une indignation de l’opinion qui mènera à l’abolition de l’esclavage. Un tel effet, disproportionné au regard de l’événement, mérite que l’on s’y intéresse de près :quelles stratégies rhétoriques, quels dispositifs énonciatifs, purent donc porter un coup fatal à un système sur lequel reposait pourtant pour bonne part la richesse de l’Empire britannique ?
Continuer la lecture de « Frédéric Regard : « Emancipation, autorité, énonciation : leçons de l’histoire de l’esclave Mary Prince » »