‘A Hive of Mysterious Danger’

The author, on teaching a literature class at Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York:

As I mentioned earlier, the class I taught at Auburn was on existentialist literature, with works by Camus, Kafka, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky on the syllabus. Existentialism, I told my students, and winced as I heard myself say it, is a “philosophy of the streets.” It was an overly dramatic statement, but I meant that existentialism is a style of thinking grounded in the messy ambiguities of life. One thing that distinguished philosophers like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard from the philosophers who preceded them was a willingness to reflect seriously about human emotions that, while not wholly neglected in the Western philosophical tradition, had tended to take a backseat to reason: emotions such as love, terror, pity, revenge, grief and joy. The prisoners in my class had an entire grammar of experiences to draw from, a familiarity with the courts, for instance, which gave them a special insight into Kafka’s The Trial, or a knowledge of what it means to be an outsider, which made them sympathize with Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, and they quickly warmed to the idea of drawing connections between their experiences and the concepts they encountered in the readings.

Source: Missouri Review
Published: Apr 1, 2010
Length: 30 minutes (7,714 words)