Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law

The literary studies section of the Norm, Law and Criminalization project considers the following topics. This project analyses, on one hand, the discursive stigmatization of groups of people, who are excluded due to their having transgressed norms of law (criminalization). On the other hand, the project explores experiences of stigmatization. These experiences, which are associated with the prison as the site of exclusion, often lead those who are stigmatized to create new identities. Thus discourses generate objective and subjective social identities. These processes are made tangible in literature by means of literary techniques such as discourses of attribution, metaphors and imagological projections as well as strategies for attracting and directing reader/audience sympathy.

The goals of this project are:

• to describe and analyse discursive practices;
• to delineate social identities in literary and nonliterary genres of English literature (novel, drama, film, journalism, autobiography, hagiography, criminological discourse) to the degree that these genres characterize the "criminal"
• to explore the literary topoi, metaphorics and visual representations (also in film) of these identity configurations and the way in which they complement or counteract discursive exclusions;
• to analyse the stylistic techniques delineated above historically on the basis of chosen genres from the late Renaissance to the modern period, including analyses of film, since this genre became, in the twentieth century, the most important source for ordinary perceptions of the reality of prison;
• to study the influence of animal metaphors on scientific discourse, particularly on the discourse of positivist criminology;
• finally, to modify substantially the theoretical position of Foucault and New Historicism with regard to the relation between power and discourse.

• Fludernik - Project Description
• Alber - Project Description
• Lederer - Project Description
• Olson - Project Description

Fludernik - Project Description

Carceral Topography and Metaphorics: Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy

Prison settings and prison metaphors as well as literary topoi related to the carceral thematic are the subject of this study. The book will discuss literary schemata that recur in the representation of fictional and autobiographical representations of carceral settings and the symbolizations that can be observed to develop in these passages. Secondly, the prevalent use of prison imagery both in conjunction with prison settings and independent of them will be analysed. In particular, gender-related prison metaphors (marriage is a prison) and metaphors such as conceiving of factories as prisons or work as imprisoning will receive ample discussion, as will the postcolonial inflections of carceral metaphor.

The study compares representative example texts from the Renaissance to the late twentieth century, contrasting fictional and autobiographical writing as well as covering all three major literary genres (fiction, drama, poetry). Special emphasis will be put on the influence of the historical background on the representation of carceral settings. Moreover, the current political situation as regards views about prisoners, prison conditions, and general public attitudes and policy decisions will be focused on in the final chapter of the book.

Ultimately, the study attempts to explain why prison is such a recurrent topic and prevalent metaphor in literary texts and how literary treatments of carcerality, in particular the development of a carceral imaginary, interrelate with real-world attitudes and policies regarding crime and punishment.

Alber - Project Description

Banished Behind Bars: The Representation and Role of Prisons from Charles Dickens's Novels to Twentieth-Century Film

In his dissertation, Jan Alber deals with the representation and role of prisons from Charles Dickens's novels to twentieth-century film. The following points are central to this project:

• the reciprocal relationship between the social text of the prison and prison narratives;
• the influence of Dickens on prison narratives of the twentieth century;
• media-related questions concerning the representation of the experience of imprisonment and metaphors that involve the prison;
• the ideological underpinnings of prison narratives concerning the alleged 'nature' of prisons and their inmates;
• narratological questions concerning the narrating in novels as opposed to films.

Alber argues that the narrative structures of Dickens's authorial novels and prison films reflect the near-continuous observation of the prisoner's body, while the first-person prison novels that are typical of the twentieth century primarily reflect the creation of individuality in prison and continue processes like self-inspection and self-observation that were inspired by the prison.

Furthermore, Dickens's novels Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations anticipate two important developments in prison narratives of the twentieth century. On the one hand, the numerous hypodiegetic first-person letters, diaries, and confessions in the authorial novels Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities foreshadow the inward migration of twentieth-century prison novels, which primarily present us with first-person accounts of the self in the cell. In this respect, the pseudo autobiography Great Expectations serves as the most important link between prison narratives of the nineteenth and prison narratives of the twentieth century. On the other hand, Alber argues that Dickens's pictorial novels (and in particular the quasi-audiovisual scenes of mob violence in A Tale of Two Cities) anticipate the cinema's moving images in a variety of ways.

Alber is also interested in the ideological underpinnings of prison narratives, i.e. the ideas about the alleged 'nature' of criminals, prisoners, and prisons that are embedded in prison novels and films which these texts then spread. Prison narratives may construct prisoners as the innocent victims of an evil society. From this perspective, the prison is represented as being nothing but an instrument of a fundamentally unjust society. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, prison narratives may legitimise the prison by arguing that irreclaimably depraved criminals will always exist.

Finally, on the basis of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish and further historical and criminological material, Alber distils essential features of the experience of imprisonment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He then compares the representation of these crucial aspects of imprisonment in prison novels and films of the twentieth century in order to illustrate what novels can do that films cannot do (and vice versa). Finally, Alber investigates metaphorical extensions of the prison theme and shows how such metaphors can be generated in novels and films. First of all, he deals with metaphors of imprisonment (PRISON IS X). Second, he shows that some prison narratives posit a homological structure between the prison and society so that certain societal conflicts - like class conflicts or society's racism - may be reproduced (and perhaps intensified) behind the walls of the prison (PRISON IS LIKE SOCIETY). Third, Alber shows how certain prison narratives define society or the world as a prison (THE WORLD IS A PRISON). He argues that this is primarily done by using metonyms of the prison (like chains, fetters, bars, etc.) to describe the world outside.

Lederer - Project Description

Sacred Demonization: Constituting Identities and Alterities in English Renaissance Hagiography

In his dissertation Thomas Lederer analyses English sacred biography of the Reformation. The term 'sacred biography' is used in the broadest sense to refer to narratives of the lives of women and men whose behavior and religious orientation appeared to their contemporaries and later to be above average and therefore 'pleasing to God' and worthy of imitation. The following points are central to this project:

• rhetorical strategies of exclusion and inclusion, of demonization and canonization, of criminalization and normativization;
• how is the carnivalesque, the deliberate inversion of paradigms, instrumentalized for defaming the Other and justifying one's own position?
• the potential of (self-)deconstruction inherent to the texts, especially in cases of paradox/oxymoron and the fire metaphor;
• the connection between religious affiliation and national belonging (Englishness) in the texts, which he describes as 'denomiNation';
• continuities and discontinuities between late medieval sacred biography and its Renaissance counterpart as well as between Reformational and Counter-Reformational texts.

Olson - Project Description

'Criminal Animals' and the Rise of Positivist Criminology: From Shakespeare to Conrad and Norris

This study explores relations between science, literature, and culture. Specifically, 'Criminal Animals' researches how earlier depictions of criminals as animalistic affected the genesis of criminology at the end of the nineteenth century. The use and functions of animal metaphors and imagery are analysed in two mutually dependent groups of texts. These include 'literary' texts-English dramas and prose works featuring criminals that were written between 1590 and 1900-as well as their 'factual' counterparts, that is, accounts of crime offered by pamphlets, court sessions, news reports, and early theories of crime.

The following theses are posited with relation to three time periods - the Renaissance, the 'long' eighteenth century, and the nineteenth century:

• early modern 'animalistic' images of criminals contributed to later criminological theories which conceive of criminality as an inherent and biologically determined. (Analysed texts include dramas by William Shakespeare and John Webster as well as early modern comedies in comparison with Robert Greene's, Thomas Dekker's and other anonymous authors' crime pamphlets.);
• during the eighteenth century animalistic depictions of criminals became less popular due to the rise of a "culture of sensibility", which encouraged an increasing sympathy for animals and a decreased interest in portraying them as subhuman or unfeeling. (Texts corpus includes novels by Defoe, Fielding, and Richardson as well as broadsheets and the Newgate Calendar.);
• at the end of the nineteenth century many English prose authors (Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Bram Stoker) responded directly or indirectly to Cesare Lombroso's theory that there was a class of "born criminals", that is law breakers whose numerous physical anomalies or 'stigmata' proved them to be atavistic and closely related to so-called lower animals (L'Uomo delinquente, 1876). Lombroso was, in turn, influenced by Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871) and B. A. Morel's degeneration theory (Treatise on Degeneracy, 1857; Formation of Typology in Degeneracy, 1864). With its aim of working empirically, Lombroso's positivist school of anthropological criminology was particularly well received in the United States, where Naturalist writers such as Frank Norris and Stephen Crane gave concrete form to his theory in their depictions of crime;
• images of stigmatized 'animalistic' criminals did not simply influence early biological theories of crime but also continue to contribute to representations of criminals in popular and scientific forums.