Dis/inquisition
Date
2021-09-01
Authors
Wilcox, John
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Abstract
The relationships of readers, writers, narrative voice and locus, and the discursive practices governing these relationships locate themselves in the self-conscious subject. Prison writers, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have written the subject in ways demonstrating the progressive weakness of this entity in epistemological and ontological systems. From Francois Villon to Dostoevski to Breytenbach, prison writers have established, stabilized and disintegrated the self-conscious subject as the origin of textual authority. This subject disintegrates as the origin of textual authority for the thesis as well. The subject, as authorial presence recedes in many texts, now occupies indeterminate literary space. Prison writers point to the decomposition of the subject and a conception of subjectivities beyond/aside from the self-conscious subject as constituted in the discursive practices issuing from the Enlightenment.