An array of academic, activist, and media projects have propelled the United States’ prison industrial complex into public focus. Meanwhile, a recent PEN America program, the Writing for Justice Fellowship, has fostered similar efforts in a literary register, harnessing “the power of writers and writing in bearing witness to the societal consequences of mass incarceration by capturing and sharing the stories of incarcerated individuals.” This push, however, depends on notions of authentic and representative narratives emanating from the experiences of marginalized populations, and does so to a fault. Theorist Jodi Melamed criticizes the propensity of literary studies after World War II to pursue such narratives as a means of nominally engaging societal problems while eliding their deep economic and structural roots. This paper extends her criticism to the burgeoning popular interest in prison literature oriented toward memoir and similar realist projects. In place, I propose a turn to genre and other forms which indulge the fictional and fantastic, analyzing as case studies, Jennifer Egan’s hybrid gothic-realist novel The Keep and Curtis Dawkins’s short story “573543” from his recent collection The Graybar Hotel. The two pieces prove formally inventive, thematically complex, and plot-wise, a tad bizarre. But, both eschew realist representation of a carceral environment, opting instead to challenge or subvert an audience’s expectations for a representative portrait of prison life. The conspicuously fictional key employed by Egan and Dawkins compels readers to reimagine contemporary prison literature beyond a medium for the ostensibly authentic, and to attribute to the subject area and its authors the equivalent complexity accorded to outside writers.

Raymond Moylan would like to thank their faculty sponsor Rachel Greenwald Smith for their support of this project.