The Rhetorical Cartographies of Imprisoned Writers. Benjamin Bogart University of Louisville

University of Louisville ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository Electronic Theses and Dissertations 8-2015 Doing time by conceiving space : the rhetorical cartographies of imprisoned writers. Benjamin Bogart University of Louisville Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd Part of the Rhetoric and Composition Commons Recommended Citation Bogart, Benjamin, "Doing time by conceiving space : the rhetorical cartographies of imprisoned writers." (2015). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 2261. https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/2261 This Doctoral Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The nivU ersity of Louisville's Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The nivU ersity of Louisville's Institutional Repository. This title appears here courtesy of the author, who has retained all other copyrights. For more information, please contact [email protected]. DOING TIME BY CONCEIVING SPACE: THE RHETORICAL CARTOGRAPHIES OF IMPRISONED WRITERS By Benjamin Bogart B.A., Missouri State University, 2007 M.A., Missouri State University, 2010 M.A., Missouri State University, 2011 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Louisville in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy In English/Rhetoric and Composition Department of English University of Louisville Louisville, Kentucky August 2015 Copyright 2015 by Benjamin Bogart All Rights Reserved DOING TIME BY CONCEIVING SPACE: THE RHETORICAL CARTOGRAPHIES OF IMPRISONED WRITERS By Benjamin Bogart B.A., Missouri State University, 2007 M.A., Missouri State University, 2010 M.A., Missouri State University, 2011 A Dissertation Approved on August 11, 2015 by the following Dissertation Committee: ____________________________________________ Stephen Schneider ____________________________________________ Kiki Petrosino ____________________________________________ Tim Johnson ____________________________________________ Bronwyn Williams ___________________________________________ John Gibson ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank first my director, Dr. Stephen Schneider, for his inspiration, guidance, and patience. I would also like to thank my other committee members, Kiki Petrosino, Dr. Tim Johnson, Dr. Bronwyn Williams, and Dr. John Gibson, for their attentive eyes and helpful comments over the past two years. I would also like to express my gratitude to my wife, Gina, who stuck by me even when I was unsure where I was headed, and who pushed me on when I felt like throwing in the towel. Finally, I would like to thank my mother, Katy, and my brother, Sam, for not asking too many questions during the process, and for accepting the easy answers when they did. iii ABSTRACT DOING TIME BY CONCEIVING SPACE: THE RHETORICAL CARTOGRAPHIES OF IMPRISONED WRITERS Benjamin Bogart August 11, 2015 This dissertation is a theoretical analysis of rhetorical constructions of identity as they are impacted by spatiality, with specific regard to the writing of incarcerated persons. It begins with an exploration of prison as “rhetorical space”—that is, the specific geography of communicative events, which includes both the material conditions of the environment as well as the cultural, abstracted conditions which offer persuasive potential. Proposing then a framework for analysis along these lines—a concept called “rhetorical cartography”—it then turns its attention, in the latter half, to analysis of actual texts authored by American prisoners. This dissertation is divided into four chapters, covering prison space, rhetorical cartography, and extended analyses of two subject groups. Chapter One considers the historical and theoretical dimensions of the modern prison as it works with accounts of the prison’s spatiality from guards and inmates alike. Drawing on these texts, Chapter One suggests that prison space and the prisoner identity are dialectically linked, resulting in a conception of the prison that results from its prisoners, as well as ideas about individual prisoner identities that emerge from the environment of the prison. Chapter Two attends to relevant spatial and postmodern theory in order to propose a framework iv for studying this linkage of space and identity: “rhetorical cartography.” Chapter Two then elaborates on this framework via explorations of texts that draw attention to this linkage, resulting in the identification of a two-step pattern of rhetorical action: “spatial inventory” and “recalibration.” While Chapters One and Two serve to theorize the rationale and framework behind “rhetorical cartography,” Chapters Three and Four turn more heavily to analysis of prison texts. Chapter Three considers the cartographic rhetoric of African-American males writing in the context of the civil rights era; Chapter Four enters a modern context by exploring the increasingly visible texts of female prisoners. While Chapter Three focuses more heavily on the shared rhetorical moves of its subjects as a group, Chapter Four looks to explore the moves of prisoners who are less aware of each other’s work, and yet who exhibit similar constructions of identity with relation to cultural identity. v TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………...iii ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………...iv LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………...vii INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………...1 CHAPTER ONE: The Place of the Prison and the Identity of the Prisoner………….….15 CHAPTER TWO: Rhetorical Cartography and Prison Writers……………………..….53 CHAPTER THREE: Race, Space, and Distance………………………………….…...100 CHAPTER FOUR: Variations on a Political Cartography……………………….....…146 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………....191 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………..……..200 CURRICULUM VITA…………………………………………………………………206 vi LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE PAGE 2.1. The Binary Logic of the Prison, in “Mama Tried”…………………………………56 2.2. King’s “Letter” as Thirdspatial Map……………………………………………….75 2.3. A Chronological Mapping of Malcolm X’s Identities……………………………...81 2.4. A Thematic Rendering of X’s Locational Inventory……………………………….83 3.1. The Binary Logic of Racism………………………………………………………116 3.2. Carter’s Alienation as Exetastic Buildup………………………………………….128 4.1. Nancy Birkla’s “Alienation Via Disappointment”………………………………..154 4.2. Birkla’s Conception of Marriage: A Location as Product of Alienation…………157 4.3. Brenda Medina’s Quest for Fulfillment…………………………………………...166 4.4. Medina’s Exploration of Gang Space……………………………………………..167 4.5. The Spatiality of Fulfillment/Disappointment…………………………………….173 4.6. Piper Kerman’s Mapping of Prison Acceptance…………………………………..179 4.7. The Tribalism of FCI Danbury……………………………………………………181 4.8. Overlapping Maps of Feminine Obsessions, with Attention to Institutions………183 4.9. The Gravity of Prison Logic……………………………………………………....186 vii INTRODUCTION DOING TIME? This sense of dead and heavy-hanging time probably explains the premium placed on what might be called removal activities, namely, voluntary unserious pursuits which are sufficiently engrossing and exciting to lift the participant out of himself, making him oblivious for the time being to his actual situation. If the ordinary activities in total institutions can be said to torture time, these activities mercifully kill it. -Erving Goffman, Asylums 68-9 Why is it that we so often refer to prisoners “doing time”? We might ascribe this preoccupation with temporality to the terms of prison sentences themselves, which commonly get used mainly to indicate the length a prisoner will be incarcerated: “five years good time,” “20 years without possibility of parole,” and the more ambiguous (though certainly temporally-preoccupied) “life.” But I would like to posit that such preoccupations speak more to the understanding of prison on the outside—what those of us who haven’t been incarcerated think of a prison bid. In fact, as the quote that leads this section reveals, it might be more appropriate to think of this time as “dead,” rather than being actively spent. We may conjure up images of Steve McQueen thumping his baseball against the “cooler” walls in The Great Escape, or Tim Robbins crafting his intricate chess pieces of soapstone in The Shawshank Redemption, and expect we know something about how prison requires one to “pass time.” But if, as Goffman claims, such activities are meant to “mercifully kill” that time so as to render one “oblivious” to the experiences around them, then the phrase we find so ubiquitous to discussion of prisoners and penality may be missing a larger point: no 1 one “does time.” Time, in prison, may not exist; certainly not in the way we think of it on the outside. Although, maybe this effect is more widely-felt than by prisoners alone. Nedra Reynolds, in her essay “Composition’s Imagined Geographies: The Politics of Space in the Frontier, City, and Cyberspace,” makes it a point, in theorizing the locations important to our field, to address the concept of “time-space compression”—a chiefly postmodern concern in which “space flattens out” and “time becomes both harder to notice and more important” (Reynolds, “Imagined Geographies” 18, original emphasis). A product of the duel influence of technology and capitalism, Reynolds’ vision of time- space compression considers the work of critical geographers such as David Harvey, Edward Soja, and Henri Lefebvre to suggest a danger

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