Freed from Foucault: The Prison in Reality and Representation, 1450-1650
Seeking 20-minute papers for a panel to be submitted to the organizers of this year's Sixteenth Century Studies Conference (in Toronto, 22-25 October 1998).
Papers should address experiences of incarceration, or the significance of
representations of bondage and confinement (real or imaginary), in Europe or its periphery
during the early modern period.
The aim of the panel is to contribute to a renewed and re-historicized discussion of
carceral practices as well as tropes of confinement in the period. As the title implies,
submissions should be free of narrowly Foucauldian assumptions, since so far as early
modern Europe is concerned, Foucault's work on the subject is not reliable. (Whatever may
still be said for Foucault's account of the post-Enlightenment prison as a
quintessentially "modern" institution - as an emblem of the emergence of
"modern" individual subjectivity, self-policing and surveillance, etc.-- yet the
current consensus of specialists is that Foucault's account of earlier prisons needs
serious revision, if not outright rejection in favor of new narratives.)
Historical submissions should be conceived, at least in part, as speculative and
theoretically informed contributions to cultural studies, and not be limited solely to the
reporting of archival discoveries (though original research is of course highly welcome).
The panel will be interdisciplinary if possible; historians, literary historians and critics, specialists in cultural studies, historians of religion, legal historians, anthropologists with a historical focus, and art historians and musicologists, etc. are all invited to submit.
Please direct abstracts to N. R. Moschovakis via either the e-mail or the
snail mail address below. Submission
deadline for abstracts is April 26th.
(Note: The organizers of the Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference have extended the
deadline for panel submissions to May 15th.)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
N. R. Moschovakis
Instructor in English
Sewanee College
The University of the South
735 University Ave.
Sewanee, TN 37383
(931) 598-1723
nmoschov@sewanee.edu
© 1997-, R.G. Siemens (Editor, EMLS).
(PD 9 March 1998)