عبر النّوعيّة في أدب السّجون: توقٌ إلى الحرّيّة، تجاوزٌ للواقع وتمرّد على أشكال السّلطة

Abstract

Prison literature is an act of revenge, revelation, and condemnation. When the educated prisoner uses the 'word' as a weapon to save his soul after his bitter experience, he penetrates all the taboos and forms of authority through writing. If the modernist novel and what appeared after it constitute a revolution against reality under dictatorship and the robbing of freedom, we can say the novel of the prison belongs to the modernist novel from this perspective. In addition, if much of prison literature belongs to modernism and what appeared after it, it is no wonder that it is influenced by inter-genre writing. The particularity of the prison experience must have had a particular impact on the forms of writing. The prison, which is a form of violation, needs a form that contains it. Hence, it is no wonder that the genre of the novel is violated, too. And as a result, it is alienated from its generic purity. The novelist seeks to restore his robbed freedom by an attempt to get away from the classical form and violate the literary form and hybridise it.  

Destruction of the artistic form of the novel constitutes a reproduction of the experience of life itself in a new fictional form. In this way, prison literature becomes a penetrative revolutionary narration against all the forms of authority, starting with the authority of the text and ending with the authority of the system.

Accordingly, this study seeks to investigate inter-generic writing in prison novels and discuss the interconnectivity between genres and the mixture between multiple forms of art. This is done through exploring specific texts based on the following points: mixture between the autobiographic form and the novel form, intertextuality, free associations and stream of consciousness, montage and collage, stickers and movie arts, and multiplicity of voices.