As I was preparing to leave for Chicago, I read the latest PMLA special-topic issue, Remapping Genre, coordinated by Wai Chee Dimock and Bruce Robbins. So, impressed once again by the power of the concept of genre, I begin by remarking the form of what I am doing here tonight. That genre is, of course, something called an MLA presidential address. There have been 116 such addresses since 1883, when forty professors met at Columbia to found the MLA. As the 117th president in this long line, I prepared for this evening by doing a small study of what my predecessors have written for the occasion over more than a century. Such a study, I might add, is very much part of the genre. Certain features of the canon are persistent enough to catch the eye of even the most casual student of the form. The dominant structure of an MLA presidential address is an arrangement that goes back at least to the Sophists: it is an argument arranged as a contest between two antitheses. Over the years, the dichotomies have changed, but the template of binary opposition has remained improbably constant.

Panopticism seeks to make the pysche visible to a top-down system of examination and classification. In the process, it drives out privacy, the right to privacy, and, with them, the right to free self-making. Against this driving out, Etheridge Knight poses a remarkable body of poetry and prose that becomes a kind of antipanopticon in its cultivation of unconstrained communication and communion. During the years he spent as a “guest” of the Indiana State Prison, for instance, Knight wrote for prison and, later, other publications. He sought, even in the prison columns that were his main early outlet, to cultivate a communicative feedback loop capable of providing a channel through which hospitality could reach those who could not recognize themselves in mainstream American discourse. Knight's feedback loop confirms Jacques Derrida's view that “language is hospitality.”

While Robert Frost's emphasis on ordinary themes has often been noted, his use of ordinary time bears further attention: his poems show how the repetitive pattern of daily living can be a creative possibility rather than an enervating necessity. His everyday verse suggests revised definitions of lyric temporality as well as new reconciliations of the dualistic oppositions structuring accounts of modernist and Americanist literature. In Frost, human repetition allows a willful independence endorsed by the natural world. The generally neglected poem “In the Home Stretch” demonstrates his most beneficent version of ordinary living, showing how retrospection and conversation are crucial elements of its practice and how marriage can promote these habits. Frost provides a contrasting, failed version of everyday practice in “Home Burial” and a comparable sense of repetitive possibility in “Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same.”

In Prague a debate is taking place over whether an aquarium ought to be built on the site that once housed the largest monument to Stalin. The site is difficult to contend with, not only because it is a physical reminder of the atrocities committed during the Communist rule but also because of the monument's bizarre history, one plagued by absurd events. The monument's history is preserved in obscure historical and fictional narratives. I explore these narratives in terms of monumentality, foreign imposition, socialist-realist aesthetics, power, and humor. I concentrate on the dual function the absurd served in the history of the statue. Reliance on humor, while enabling the Czechs to undercut the monumentality of this emblem of the imposition of foreign power, also fostered a forgetting of the statue's history and political significance. Thus, the Czechs' propensity for the absurd, even if temporarily freeing, ultimately undermines the nation's understanding of its past.

About one hundred inmates are seated in the prison gym, waiting for the performance of king lear to begin. Then Jamal, as Edmund, steps out from behind the makeshift set and paces across the stage, his sharply trimmed goatee pointing outward like an accusing finger, his burning gaze fixed on the audience. He raps: “Secret fears are brought to life on stage. / My life is in a rage, and to write my life / One page is not enough. / But if I had one mike I might be able to / Escape this cage … bring Shakespeare to life through my high beams.” Appropriating Cordelia's words, he declares that “I am not the first who have incurred the worst / But I have concurred with those who oppose my life's worth. …” He continues:

They label me violent because I stay bottled up and silent
And although my life is like a raging sea
My heart sings … no life is quiet.
Stop complaining, you say, but I can't because
I'm trapped on the stage of life's lies.
And I ask you
Why brand they us with base? With baseness?
Bastardy? Base? Base?

As the shadow of the colossal american prison lengthens amid the encroaching nightfall of our twenty-first-century security state, it is pierced by a brilliant though flickering illumination: the literature created by those who have endured the terrors of America's walls and cells, with their unremitting surveillance, relentless brutality, and overpowering hopelessness. When I began teaching American prison literature back in 1975, there were 360,000 people incarcerated in the nation's jails and prisons. Today there are more than 2.4 million—almost twenty-five percent of all the prisoners in the world. During these thirty-three years, this country has constructed on average one new prison every week. Many states annually spend more on prisons than they do on higher education. More than five million Americans have been permanently disenfranchised because of felony convictions. More than seven million are under the direct control of the criminal-justice system. And the experience of these millions of prisoners and ex-prisoners becomes ever more integral to American culture, not just to the culture of the devastated neighborhoods where most prisoners grew up and to which they return but also to the culture of an entire society grown accustomed to omnipresent surveillance cameras, routine body and car searches, and police patrolling the corridors of high schools.

For a little while now, i've been trying to understand the nature of captivity and confinement in four overlapping but distinct models prominent today. These four are the United States' model of mass imprisonment of surplus racial and ethnic populations as a form of socioeconomic abandonment; military imprisonment, especially in the course of permanent security wars; the European model of the detention of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees (“Fortress Europe”); and the Israeli model of occupation by encirclement and immobilization. In all these forms, or zones, of captivity, the status of the worker, the enemy, the criminal, the migrant, the resident—and thus the prisoner himself or herself—is being modified and mutated in profound ways. In each, older recognizable dynamics of race and class power persist and extend in new directions. In each, the very physicality of the prison takes at the same time more extreme and more abstract concretization as isolation unit, as camp, as safe haven, as city. I've wanted to develop a conceptual and evocative vocabulary for linking the socioeconomic dynamics of accumulation, dispossession, and political power to the dialectic of social death and social life as these meet in the ontological and epistemological status of the prisoner.

At lawtey correctional institution in florida, a group of around two hundred men gather in the prison chapel. They watch raptly as the Christian-based drama group, His Majesty's Productions, performs One Thing. The stage is set to look like the prison yard, where three groups of men banter with one another. As one group begins talking, the other two freeze into tableaus. In the first exchange, the character Buster says to Jim that when he gets out, he's never coming back. “Yeah, how do you know that?” Jim asks skeptically.

Reading receives considerable cultural and institutional support in the contemporary united states, from face-to-face, televised, and online book clubs to community-wide reading initiatives such as Michigan Reads!; One Book, One Philadelphia; and On the Same Page Cincinnati. In United States prisons, however, opportunities for reading and education have steadily declined since the prisoners' rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s gave way to the retributive-justice framework of the 1980s and beyond.

During my ten years teaching college classes and directing eight plays at framingham women's prison in massachusetts, I was always at odds with institutionally funded education programs behind bars. While I chose plays and ran discussions to expand thinking (The Merchant of Venice, Lysistrata, The Taming of the Shrew, Simply Maria, and Waiting for Lefty, to name a few) the unspoken aim of the education department was to reform the women—that is, to enlighten them on what society says is the “best” way to be, to teach socially accepted behavior as an antidote to crime.

There is something ugly about incarceration. Over 2.2 million people are locked in jails and prisons in the united states; $60 billion a year is spent to support this effort. But there is also the old comparison of the prison with the monk's cell, a place of contemplation and self-reflection, and Jean Genet's sense of “a close relationship between flowers and convicts” (9). As a probation officer I know likes to remind me, “If you want to find Jesus, just go into the prisons. He is always there.” In any discussion of prisons, there are always opposing terms to consider: incarceration and freedom, body and consciousness, the hard core and the vulnerable, mind-forged manacles and visionary imagination.

Since 1978, the population of women prisoners in the united states has increased by four hundred percent. The number of women now living and dying in cells exceeds 200,000 (United States Dept. of Justice). They are without access to proper health care, without the children that many of them will lose permanently: they are without. These are stark details, obscene in their materiality. They are facts, but they are not the picture. The picture is impossible. Indeed, the picture is the problem.

When i first started teaching as a volunteer instructor in the college program at san quentin state prison in 1999, I used to imagine writing an article about what I was experiencing to submit to PMLA. The thought of that article took on an almost therapeutic function; it became a mental structure for processing what was often, from the beginning, an intellectually and emotionally overwhelming experience. At the time, it seemed natural that sharing what I was learning with a few thousand stranger-colleagues was the most reassuring thing I could imagine. Only in retrospect do I find this a strangely moving illustration of what it means to me to be a part of an intellectual community. I would never have imagined back then that the editors of PMLA themselves would one day initiate an entire special issue on this topic.

One doesn't get too many teaching moments like this: I am standing by the water fountain outside our classroom. One of the students taking a break from the final exam in the course in Dante's Divine Comedy looks up at me from the fountain and says, “When I read this stuff, it's like I'm out of here.”