This essay first briefly examines African American novelist Chester Himes’ genre-defying position... more This essay first briefly examines African American novelist Chester Himes’ genre-defying position as prison writer turned detective writer, whose influence is clear not only in the usual suspects such as Walter Mosley but also in the Blaxploitation films of the early 1970s, and in the urban fiction tradition from Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim on down through today’s Triple Crown books and others. I then look at how Himes’ work has been received by the college students and incarcerated people who each spring for the past 20 years have worked together in reading groups set at the local county jail in a project linked to a class I teach, in order to raise questions about genre, audience and pedagogy. The two groups of readers, who may come to see each other as one group over the series of meetings, often develop readings of Himes’ novel that push back against the analysis I present in the classroom.
The 'Jail Project' is an ongoing service-learning project that brings together Nazareth College s... more The 'Jail Project' is an ongoing service-learning project that brings together Nazareth College students in an introductory literature class with Monroe Correctional Facility inmates who have been provided with books for that class, for a series of meetings in jail classrooms to discuss literature and its relation to our lives. Over six years of doing this work, I have encouraged each small group of students and inmates to regard each other as resources, with varying backgrounds, knowledge, talents, and beliefs. Since the theme of the course is 'Crime and Punishment in the USA,' even when the inmates, as the demographics of US incarceration would predict, bring weaker educational backgrounds to the discussion, they often bring real-life experience of the criminal justice system that the college students do not. However, for all my careful preparation and thinking about reciprocity in this collaboration among peers, insofar as I thought about hope at all, I assumed that the college students would be bringing it to the inmates. Although this does happen, a surprising counter-narrative has emerged in the journals that the students and inmates keep during the project. For all their privilege, my students, the majority of whom are white and middle class, often harbour a profound cynicism about themselves, each other, and the world. How remarkable, then, that they find in this group of people, for many of who the 'American Dream' of opportunity and equality has been so relentlessly foreclosed, a spirit of hope that far exceeds their own! Vaclav Havel reflects that hope, 'especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as a prison,' is above all 'an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.' This essay shows the truth of Havel's comments, and how the experience of reading and writing together can cultivate that 'orientation' to hope.
Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association, 2004
The progressive, utopian rhetoric of the Internet's first moments has largely diminished in the f... more The progressive, utopian rhetoric of the Internet's first moments has largely diminished in the face of uneven access across various "digital divides," corporate media consolidation, and on-line monitoring and surveillance systems. Yet there are some interesting counter-trends associated with what this essay discusses as online "fandom" or "communities of appreciation," and the recent upsurge in antiglobalization activism has demonstrated how cultural communities can modulate into political ones.
Taking stock of ten years of a service learning project that brings together small groups of coll... more Taking stock of ten years of a service learning project that brings together small groups of college students and prisoners in jailhouse classrooms to discuss literary representations of crime and punishment, this essay finds in project participants' reading journals some remarkable trends. Complex dynamics of authenticity and authority emerge in the groups' weekly meetings, as participants negotiate their own and their groups' identities and commitments with respect to each other and to the literary texts, in the absence of professors, corrections officers, or other guardians of discipline. These dynamics are investigated in light of participants' discussions of a range of works, before looking in greater detail at responses to Sherman Alexie's 1996 novel Indian Killer, which are found to complicate stable notions of pedagogical authority and the object(s) of literary study.
This essay first briefly examines African American novelist Chester Himes’ genre-defying position... more This essay first briefly examines African American novelist Chester Himes’ genre-defying position as prison writer turned detective writer, whose influence is clear not only in the usual suspects such as Walter Mosley but also in the Blaxploitation films of the early 1970s, and in the urban fiction tradition from Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim on down through today’s Triple Crown books and others. I then look at how Himes’ work has been received by the college students and incarcerated people who each spring for the past 20 years have worked together in reading groups set at the local county jail in a project linked to a class I teach, in order to raise questions about genre, audience and pedagogy. The two groups of readers, who may come to see each other as one group over the series of meetings, often develop readings of Himes’ novel that push back against the analysis I present in the classroom.
The 'Jail Project' is an ongoing service-learning project that brings together Nazareth College s... more The 'Jail Project' is an ongoing service-learning project that brings together Nazareth College students in an introductory literature class with Monroe Correctional Facility inmates who have been provided with books for that class, for a series of meetings in jail classrooms to discuss literature and its relation to our lives. Over six years of doing this work, I have encouraged each small group of students and inmates to regard each other as resources, with varying backgrounds, knowledge, talents, and beliefs. Since the theme of the course is 'Crime and Punishment in the USA,' even when the inmates, as the demographics of US incarceration would predict, bring weaker educational backgrounds to the discussion, they often bring real-life experience of the criminal justice system that the college students do not. However, for all my careful preparation and thinking about reciprocity in this collaboration among peers, insofar as I thought about hope at all, I assumed that the college students would be bringing it to the inmates. Although this does happen, a surprising counter-narrative has emerged in the journals that the students and inmates keep during the project. For all their privilege, my students, the majority of whom are white and middle class, often harbour a profound cynicism about themselves, each other, and the world. How remarkable, then, that they find in this group of people, for many of who the 'American Dream' of opportunity and equality has been so relentlessly foreclosed, a spirit of hope that far exceeds their own! Vaclav Havel reflects that hope, 'especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as a prison,' is above all 'an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.' This essay shows the truth of Havel's comments, and how the experience of reading and writing together can cultivate that 'orientation' to hope.
Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association, 2004
The progressive, utopian rhetoric of the Internet's first moments has largely diminished in the f... more The progressive, utopian rhetoric of the Internet's first moments has largely diminished in the face of uneven access across various "digital divides," corporate media consolidation, and on-line monitoring and surveillance systems. Yet there are some interesting counter-trends associated with what this essay discusses as online "fandom" or "communities of appreciation," and the recent upsurge in antiglobalization activism has demonstrated how cultural communities can modulate into political ones.
Taking stock of ten years of a service learning project that brings together small groups of coll... more Taking stock of ten years of a service learning project that brings together small groups of college students and prisoners in jailhouse classrooms to discuss literary representations of crime and punishment, this essay finds in project participants' reading journals some remarkable trends. Complex dynamics of authenticity and authority emerge in the groups' weekly meetings, as participants negotiate their own and their groups' identities and commitments with respect to each other and to the literary texts, in the absence of professors, corrections officers, or other guardians of discipline. These dynamics are investigated in light of participants' discussions of a range of works, before looking in greater detail at responses to Sherman Alexie's 1996 novel Indian Killer, which are found to complicate stable notions of pedagogical authority and the object(s) of literary study.
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