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It is only in his conclusion that the author tackles issues of literary history head-on, but the concern is in play throughout and asks repeatedly, directly and indirectly, what kind of critical narrative can we put together if we zero in on prison literature with Victorians at one end and American pop culture masters at the other? What developments, literary and otherwise, do we register, what shifts do we notice in the artistic and, more broadly, social perception of disciplinary confinement? At last, given the strong imprint Dickens left on this perception-so strong that it has become virtually impossible to talk about modern incarceration without referring or alluding to Dickens-how can we evaluate his posthumousness, his critical-humanist legacy in this all-too-contested area? Narrating the Prison raises all these important questions, and the answers are both compelling and intriguing.
I will not spoil its readers the pleasure of discovering these answers for themselves as they work their way through Alber’s careful readings of novels, novellas, film, and nonfiction. “Close” as they necessarily are, showcasing some painstaking attention paid to detail, these readings are far from formalist. As noted earlier, they dwell on form to tease out its commitment to specific sociopolitical and ethical arrangements (or rearrangements). There is no question in my mind that both narrative studies and the New Historicism need this kind of approach, eclectic in the best sense, keen on stylistic details from narrative viewpoint to cinematic technique as much as on these details’ cultural and political inflections. Consistently applied across a century and a half of prison literature and film, this methodology fits its object like glove. It helps us see, for instance, how and why post-Dickensian representation of correctional landscapes gives way to an uncritical exceptionalism of sorts with the protagonist (such as Stephen King’s) set up as an “exception” to the grim rule of the prison and the imprisoned others. It is these others whom he must fight and thus prove himself as a man and as an “individual” in a racially and homosocially threatening environment that otherwise filters outside phobias associated with race, sexual choice, and class. Alber’s discussion of The Shawshank Redemption, which I have just outlined, is emblematic for how his analysis works to uncover a rather cynical or, as I say above, uncritical strain in recent carceral discourses that bespeaks the breakdown or shift of former prison-world-at-large homologies.