EVENT DETAILS

A Lecture by: Ève Morisi "Activist Poetics in Hugo's 'The Last Day of a Condemned Man'

Victor Hugo’s Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné (1829) remains, to this day, a unique fiction. It is the first French novel to recount, in diary-like form, an anonymous condemned man’s experience, from the minute he is sentenced to death to the moment he is taken up to the scaffold. This paper argues that Hugo's writing of this experience conjoins a new regime of representation and a staged crisis of communication to critique penal modernity and its impact on human integrity.