Faculty First Year Seminars 197CR5 - Orange is the new Black - 5

This class will place this year's Common Read selection, Piper Kerman?s Orange is the New Black, in the context of major works by US prison authors. To help the class consider in more depth how incarcerated US writers have represented their lived experience, throughout the semester I will provide short excerpts of work by prisoners including Angela Davis, Jean Harris, Kim Wozencraft, and Malcolm X that relate to our two central texts, Orange is the New Black and On the Yard (1967). Much of the semester will be spent reading Malcolm Braly?s classic prison novel On the Yard a few chapters at a time and discussing its treatment of topics including psychiatry, sexuality, mental illness, labor, social hierarchies, and the drug trade in prison in relation to Orange is the New Black. We will conclude by analyzing a few episodes of the TV series Orange is the New Black.

Freshmen Only