The Panopticon, designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785, has attracted wide interest in the wake of philosopher Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (originally published in French in 1975) and has been used as a model to explain prisons. The term surveillance is still very popular in crime control studies and in literary theory the concept of panopticism has seen various mostly metaphorical uses. The lecture will introduce the audience to the panopticon and these various extensions of Bentham’s original proposals and also discuss the relatively minimal adequacy of the concept for the discussion of actual prison conditions. The paper will also devote some time to the analysis of the literary works by British authors Sarah Waters and Angela Carter.
Monika Fludernik
Monika Fludernik is Professor of English at the University of Freiburg in Germany. She has published widely in narratology, postcolonial literary theory and eighteenth-century studies. She is completing a monograph on English prison settings and prison metaphors. Her publications include The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction (1993), Towards a 'Natural' Narratology (1996), and An Introduction to Narratology (2009). She has edited several special issues of journals (on second-person fiction, Style 1994; on metaphor, Poetics Today 1999; on voice, New Literary History 2001; on German narratology, Style 2004) as well as a number of collections of essays for instance: Beyond Cognitive Metaphor Theory: Perspectives on Literary Metaphor (2011), Postclassical Narratology: New Essays (2010, with Jan Alber); In the Grip of the Law: Prisons, Trials, and the Space Between (2004, with Greta Olson); Diaspora and Multiculturalism (2003); Hybridity and Postcolonialism (1998). Her essays have appeared, among others, in Anglia, Arial, Diacritics, English Literary History, English Studies, Narrative, New Literary History, Poetica, Semiotica, Style, and Textual Practice.
