Papers by Vicky Anderson
Friday I got an idea. I am now in the midst of writing the biggest true Confession I have ever wr... more Friday I got an idea. I am now in the midst of writing the biggest true Confession I have ever written, all for the remote possibility of gaining… filthy lucre. A contest in True Story is in the offing, with all sorts of Big Money prizes. Being a most mercenary individual, because mercenary can buy trips to Europe, theaters, chop houses, and other Ill Famed what-nots, I am trying out for it … anyhow, Sylvia just finished the rough draft of a whopping true Confession of over 40 (you can count them) pages, trying to capture the style, and let me tell you, my supercilious attitude about the people who write Confessions has diminished. It takes a good tight plot and a slick ease that are not picked up overnight like a cheap whore. (Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962 How to take Plath at her word? The above quotation from a 20-year-old Sylvia's journal shows Plath's relationship to the confession, albeit an early one. Confession here is not precisely confession, but rather something hovering dangerously between fiction and testimony, and itching to play to the crowd. The sexualized imagery Plath uses in this excerpt is pronounced; a good confession is metaphorized as a sexual technique exercised to attain specific ends; in this case, pecuniary. Despite the apparent reproaches against "the peanut-crunching crowd" depicted in "Lady Lazarus" (Plath, Ariel: The Restored Text 15), Plath here is seen to deliberately entice the peanut crunchers, the bored spectators, desperate for sensation-while setting herself up as an expensive whore.
Conference Presentations by Vicky Anderson
‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer.
Things fall apart;... more ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.'
W.B Yeats, ’The Second Coming'
Prisons and colonies share many of the same histories. Chinua Achebe’s classic 1958 novel ‘Things Fall Apart’ tells a harrowing tale of the devastating impact in West Africa of British colonialism and its penal imperatives. Basing his title on Yeats’ 1919 poem ‘The Second Coming’, which derives its impact from the British attempts to dominate Ireland, the novel shows how the Word of Law traps, manipulates and erases those caught within its legislative and linguistic snares, and ultimately controls the narrative through the arc of (hi)story.
Given the findings of the Lammy Review, this paper draws on historical and theoretical sources - as well as practical experience and examples of Stretch storytelling projects in prisons - to ask to what extent can we draw parallels between the current prison crisis - which, many would agree, has devolved into ‘mere anarchy’ - and the legacies of colonialism? What impacts do such legacies enact upon BME (and other) prisoners today; and if the legal system only winds us further into ‘the widening gyre’, upon what differential narrative tools and strategies might we draw to find a way out of the crisis?
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Papers by Vicky Anderson
Conference Presentations by Vicky Anderson
The falcon cannot hear the falconer.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.'
W.B Yeats, ’The Second Coming'
Prisons and colonies share many of the same histories. Chinua Achebe’s classic 1958 novel ‘Things Fall Apart’ tells a harrowing tale of the devastating impact in West Africa of British colonialism and its penal imperatives. Basing his title on Yeats’ 1919 poem ‘The Second Coming’, which derives its impact from the British attempts to dominate Ireland, the novel shows how the Word of Law traps, manipulates and erases those caught within its legislative and linguistic snares, and ultimately controls the narrative through the arc of (hi)story.
Given the findings of the Lammy Review, this paper draws on historical and theoretical sources - as well as practical experience and examples of Stretch storytelling projects in prisons - to ask to what extent can we draw parallels between the current prison crisis - which, many would agree, has devolved into ‘mere anarchy’ - and the legacies of colonialism? What impacts do such legacies enact upon BME (and other) prisoners today; and if the legal system only winds us further into ‘the widening gyre’, upon what differential narrative tools and strategies might we draw to find a way out of the crisis?
The falcon cannot hear the falconer.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.'
W.B Yeats, ’The Second Coming'
Prisons and colonies share many of the same histories. Chinua Achebe’s classic 1958 novel ‘Things Fall Apart’ tells a harrowing tale of the devastating impact in West Africa of British colonialism and its penal imperatives. Basing his title on Yeats’ 1919 poem ‘The Second Coming’, which derives its impact from the British attempts to dominate Ireland, the novel shows how the Word of Law traps, manipulates and erases those caught within its legislative and linguistic snares, and ultimately controls the narrative through the arc of (hi)story.
Given the findings of the Lammy Review, this paper draws on historical and theoretical sources - as well as practical experience and examples of Stretch storytelling projects in prisons - to ask to what extent can we draw parallels between the current prison crisis - which, many would agree, has devolved into ‘mere anarchy’ - and the legacies of colonialism? What impacts do such legacies enact upon BME (and other) prisoners today; and if the legal system only winds us further into ‘the widening gyre’, upon what differential narrative tools and strategies might we draw to find a way out of the crisis?