CALL FOR SUBMISSION - LITERATURE DOSSIER – PRISON LITERATURE: JAIL, CELL, AND SOCIAL ISOLATION IN BRAZILIAN, LATIN-AMERICAN, AND EUROPEAN LITERATURE

Period: 10/02 to 15/04/2022.

What knowledge does the cell create? Does imprisonment establish a special relation with thought? Is it possible to talk about a critical condition based on the prison?

Since the Classical antiquity, when Socrates waited for his condemnation, the cell or the prison have been environments for reflection and knowledge production. Cases such as Gramsci in Italy or Graciliano Ramos in Brazil are widely known and resulted in works about the experience of segregation. In an article of 2010, published in Rassegna Iberistica, Roberto Vecchi, professor of the University of Bologna, emphasized that the “experience of detention, the claustrophobia, exhibits another point of view about the functioning of devices on which the state of exception works, making the cell – in the same reflection field of Agamben – one more nómos of modernity” (our translation. VECCHI, Roberto, 2010: p. 47). Space and time, space and power, space and body exemplify the knowledge, reflection or knowledge possibilities provided by the cell.

This dossier focuses on the literature of Brazilian, Latin-American, and European authors about the imprisonment experience in different moments and genres. The imprisonment and all the surrounding semantics – cell, prison, social isolation or the body and its restrictions, claustrophobia, silencing – are open to many readings, since the antiquity until nowadays. In a moment that humanity is segregated or, in the best circumstances, has passed by an isolation experience, it is fundamental to revisit works and authors that in different moments and by difference motivations wrote about the imprisonment condition.

For this volume of Letras de Hoje, we invite researchers to reflect about this theme in different genres and historical periods. For such, we accept critical works evidencing the imprisonment condition, isolation, cell, prison and similar topics, in novels, poems, shorts stories, autobiographies, biographies, and other literary genres. Texts shall be inedited and must be submitted to the journal until April 15, 2022, through the journal’s official website: https://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/ojs/index.php/fale/index

References:

VECCHI, Roberto. Alegorias claustrofóbicas: o pensamento confinado, a exceção e a história literária. Rassegna Iberistica, 2010, n. 91, p. 43-52.

FOUCAULT, Michel. A microfísica do poder. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 2019.

RAVETTI, Graciela, CURY, Maria Zilda, AVILA, Myriam. Topografias da cultura. Representação, espaço e memória. Belo Horizonte: Editora da UFMG, 2009.

Editors:

Prof. Dr. Francisco Topa - Universidade do Porto - Portugal.

Prof. Dr. Maria Eunice Moreira – Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul.

Prof. Dr. Regina Kohlrausch – Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul.