Thesis (M.A.) - Carleton University, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 72-75). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Chapter One will introduce the central area of exploration of this study and establish the main terms of reference and guidelines of the research. Chapter Two will deal with the background and history of the project, and will include a discussion on creative writing as therapy in the context of a prison. Chapter Three will present a critical overview of the project's aims and results, as well as an account of the pedagogical methods employed. It will also analyse the work of three members of the writing group: Vusi Mthembu, Themba Vilakazi and Sibusiso Majola. Chapter Four will outline the socio-political context of my primary research material: a collection of poems written in prison by Bheki Mkhize, Sipho Mkhize and Bhek'themba Mbhele. It will also include a brief biographical account of the three writers, as well as an historical examination of the Seven Days War in Pietermaritzburg in the early nineties. Chapter Five will focus on the three writers' accounts of incarceration, the threat of violence in prison and their resistance through writing to the loss of identity. Chapter Six will deal with the issue of alterity, and the way that the writers represent issues of identity in their poetry, and create spaces of difference and distinction. It will also focus on intertextuality, and analyse the manner in which the writers negotiate the Western tradition of aesthetics in order to stake claim to their own spaces of difference in the prison. Chapter Seven will conclude the study, and will examine contemporary cultural studies theory with specific reference to South Africa. It will also include an overview of the proposition of the research, and elaborate the way forward for a popular culture embracing such findings. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2004.

This essay closely studies several works written by American male writers--either while the author was in an American prison, or shortly after he was released. The first works studied, from the nineteenth century, introduce the themes and questions for the later discussion of the other works, all of which are taken from the twentieth century. A central focus of the essay is on the process by which all of the authors studied attempt a textual reversal of the positions of reader and author. In each of the works, the reader, generally seen as a member of 'outside' society, is portrayed as a representative of the imprisoning society. Thus, the textual confrontation is between a prisoner/author and a warden/reader; and the subsequent reversal that takes place through the medium of the text places the reader in the position of being a prisoner, with the author becoming the prison-authority, or warden. This reversal is used by the authors examined as means or attempt at freeing themselves from both the defining and imprisoning texts of society, as well as from the actual prison where the author finds himself. The writing of the prison-text, therefore, is a verbal act intimately associated with the gaining of various forms of at least visionary freedom.

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The Political Aesthetic of the Medieval Persian Prison Poem, 1100-1200 traces the dissemination of the medieval Persian prison poem (habsiyyat) from South Asia to the Caucasus in the context of the contemporaneous developments in literary and political theory that shaped this genre. Varying attitudes towards figuration in Persian literary criticism are examined in terms of an aesthetics of incarceration that, I argue, extended the political boundaries of medieval Persian literary culture. Drawing on the pioneering works of Zafari (1985) and Akimushkina (2006), I elucidate the prison poem's strategies for making the medieval experience of incarceration available to literary representation. In documenting the dialectic between the sultan's material power and the poet's discursive sovereignty, I show how medieval Persian prison poetry critically engaged with medieval punitive practices. Ultimately, this dissertation traces the relation between the increased use of incarceration as a mode of punishment by regional sultanates and the discursive elevation of poetry that is Persian literature's greatest contribution to world literature. Concomitantly with investigating the twelfth-century aesthetics of incarceration, this dissertation documents how twelfth-century Persian poetry was transformed by idioms of literary knowledge articulated through a Persianized Arabo-Islamic rhetoric. Exegeses of specific prison poems by Mas'ud Sa'd Salman of Lahore (d. 1121), Khaqani Shirwani (d. 1199), and of other prison poets from these regions, are offered alongside documentary explorations into the status of non-Muslim minorities in Saljuq domains, the transformation of a predominantly panegyric genre into an instrument of political critique, and demonstrate the political importance of the habsiyyat to the historiography of incarceration as well as of Persian literature. By examining the literary archive of incarceration from Lahore in South Asia to Shirwan in the Caucasus, this study aims to expand the scope of investigations into the aesthetics of power as registered by literary form, to extend the temporal dimensions of the historiography of incarceration, and to contribute to classical Persian literary theory's conceptualization of genre. Chapter one offers a synoptic and global history of incarceration in the medieval world. Chapter two considers what the prison poem as a genre has to offer global literary theory. Chapter three studies the complex modulation of the qasida form through the prison poem's emphasis on the poet's lyric subjectivity. Chapter four traces the appropriation of the motifs of prophecy by Persian prison poets who aspired for a sovereignty that exceeding the boundaries of material power. Chapter five offers detailed exegeses of the two most significant texts in the medieval Persian archive of incarceration: Khaqani's Christian qasida and his qasida on the ruins of Mada'in. Chapter six documents the devolution of authority onto prison poetry and the reconstitution of material power through discursive sovereignty. Collectively, these chapters show that, just as medieval Persian prison poets protested the terms of their social contracts and thus suffered imprisonment, so did the prison poem genre contest the distribution of sovereignty in the medieval world by transferring prophecy, and prophecy's concomitant authority, to the poet.

The research examines the development of women's prison writing through the journal of the Kingston Prison for Women, Tightwire. The journal enabled the prisoners to articulate their experience of prison for themselves as a specific subject-group, as women and as legal subjects. The research connects the prison writing to alterations in legal discourse which reflect the emergence of women as a specific group. The prison writings suggest that extra-legal discourse transforms legal discourse and practice. The appendix includes a selection of poems and comments from Tightwire .

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2000. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 215-225). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

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Thesis (M.A.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Arts, 1988.