5/28/2023 0 Comments Landing by Emma Donoghue![]() ![]() As Monika Fludernik notes, ‘Western culture is steeped in images of imprisonment’ as she goes on to show in her wide-ranging study of metaphors of confinement in Anglophone literature, these images are refracted and (re)interpreted within specific cultural contexts ( 2019: vii).Įmma Donoghue’s Room is not an autobiographical account of incarceration, nor does it focus on a state institution of confinement such as a prison. While each carceral institution is inherently local (it restricts a body to a particular place), the real-world presence of sites of incarceration in different parts of the globe allows stories of imprisonment to find differently informed readerships, which create new meanings in the process. ![]() Moreover, their restricted focus gives such stories the ability to communicate across actual territorial borders, due to the potentially broad resonances of a carceral narrative space. In this sense, narrating coercive confinement is a form of border crossing, whether working from the inside out-telling of the long wait till freedom arrives-or from the outside in, bringing a reader into a world they do not know. In autobiographical accounts of incarcerated experience, the very impetus of writing is often to communicate to a broader audience what is, by definition, hidden from the outside world. For all their focus on restricted space, narratives of coercive confinement are inherently mobile. ![]()
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