GOVT 4726 - [Punitive Society]

(crosslisted) FREN 4726
(CA-AS)

Fall. Next Offered: 2019-2020. 4 credits. Student option grading.

D. Rubenstein.

Punitive Society examines the phenomena of mass incarceration and the death penalty as represented in philosophy, law, literature and film. We will address the genealogy of punishment, the absence of a philosophically rigorous Abolitionist argument in the Western tradition and the racial politics of the carceral system (what Michelle Alexander has called, “the new Jim Crow,”) Have literature and film provided more pertinent critiques of incarceration and the death penalty? We will focus on the U.S. and France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as our cases. Texts will include works by theorists Cesare Beccaria, Rousseau, Kant, Foucault, Derrida, Camus, Robert Badinter, Michelle Alexander, Loic Wacquant; writers Victor Hugo, Albert French, Ernest Gaines, Jean Genet; and filmmakers: Robert Bresson, Lars von Trier, Ozu, Fritz Lang. (PT)