Shame and Modern Writing seeks to uncover the presence of shame in and across a vast array of modern writing modalities. This interdisciplinary volume includes essays from distinguished and emergent scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and shorter practice-based reflections from poets and clinical writers. It serves as a timely reflection of shame as presented in modern writing, giving added attention to engagements on race, gender, and the question of new media representation.

This study combines psycho-social and literary perspectives to investigate the interdependency of shame and desire in Annie Ernaux's writing, arguing that shame implies desire and desire vulnerability to shame, and that the interplay between the two generates the energy for personal growth and creative endeavour.

In this ambitious new work, Frank Broucek explores the affect of shame--its functions, and its relationship to sexuality, self, and others. With a special focus on the relationship between shame and self-objectification, he proposes an innovative new theory that links shame to our sense of self from early development through maturity. In exploring this theme, Broucek--a psychoanalytically trained psychiatrist--breaks new ground in understanding the development of the self, establishing a perspective on narcissism that differs markedly from traditional psychoanalytic concepts. An illuminating overview of the modern literature precedes a provocative analysis of the role of shame in the formation of the self. Here, Broucek identifies the three major sources of shame: the infant's experiences of interpersonal inefficacy; self-objectification resulting in a kind of self-alienation or primary dissociation; and the experience of being unloved, rejected, or scapegoated by important others. In the course of development, these vectors cause the self's overinvestment in the idealized self-image and a devaluation of the actual self, an event explored in depth in the chapter on narcissism. Broucek also addresses the role of shame in psychoanalysis and in society. The neglect of this emotion in psychoanalytic theory and technique, the author contends, results from a critical lack of understanding of shame and its effect--potentially adverse--on the practice of psychotherapy. Finally, Broucek's analysis of widespread shamelessness in modern times logically extends the ideas presented earlier. Maintaining a critical balance in its coverage and interpretation, SHAME AND THE SELF marks a significant contribution to the understanding of the nature of shame and its role in our psychic life. As such, it is essential reading for all practicing psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and other mental health practitioners.

Through readings of an array of recent texts - literary and popular, fictional and autofictional, realist and experimental - this book maps out a contemporary, Western, shame culture

A “startlingly original” novel of “recursive loops through the mind of a woman who is breaking down from not making the art she absolutely must make” (Alexander Chee, Paris Review). Alma and her family live close to the land, raising chickens and sheep. While her husband works at a nearby college, she stays home with their young children, cleans, searches for secondhand goods online, and reads books by the women writers she adores. Then, one night, she abruptly leaves it all behind—speeding through the darkness, away from their Vermont homestead, bound for New York. In a series of flashbacks, Alma reveals the circumstances and choices that led to this moment: the joys and claustrophobia of their remote life; her fears and uncertainties about motherhood; the painfully awkward faculty dinners; her feelings of loneliness and failure; and her growing fascination with Celeste, a mysterious ceramicist and self-loving doppelgänger who becomes an obsession for Alma. A fable both blistering and surreal, The Shame is a propulsive, funny, and thought-provoking debut about a woman in isolation, whose mind—fueled by capitalism, motherhood, and the search for meaningful art—attempts to betray her. A Harvard Review Favorite Book of 2020, Selected by Miciah Bay Gault

Explores the role of shame as an important affect in the complex psychodynamics of literary and philosophical works.

Alexander Popper can't stop remembering. Four years old when his father tossed him into Lake Michigan, he was told, Sink or swim, kid. In his mind, he's still bobbing in that frigid water. The rest of this novel's vivid cast of characters also struggle to remain afloat: Popper's mother, stymied by an unhappy marriage, seeks solace in the relentless energy of Chicago; his brother, Leo, shadow boss of the family, retreats into books; paternal grandparents, Seymour and Bernice, once high fliers, now mourn for long lost days; his father, a lawyer and would-be politician obsessed with his own success, fails to see that the family is falling apart; and his college girlfriend, the fiercely independent Kat, wrestles with impossible choices. Covering four generations of the Popper family, Peter Orner illuminates the countless ways that love both makes us whole and completely unravels us. A comic and sorrowful tapestry of memory of connection and disconnection, Love and Shame and Love explores the universals with stunning originality and wisdom.

In a postcolonial world, where structures of power, hierarchy, and domination operate on a global scale, writers face an ethical and aesthetic dilemma: How to write without contributing to the inscription of inequality? How to process the colonial past without reverting to a pathology of self-disgust? Can literature ever be free of the shame of the postcolonial epoch--ever be truly postcolonial? As disparities of power seem only to be increasing, such questions are more urgent than ever. In this book, Timothy Bewes argues that shame is a dominant temperament in twentieth-century literature, and the key to understanding the ethics and aesthetics of the contemporary world. Drawing on thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Theodor Adorno, and Gilles Deleuze, Bewes argues that in literature there is an "event" of shame that brings together these ethical and aesthetic tensions. Reading works by J. M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Nadine Gordimer, V. S. Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Zoë Wicomb, Bewes presents a startling theory: the practices of postcolonial literature depend upon and repeat the same structures of thought and perception that made colonialism possible in the first place. As long as those structures remain in place, literature and critical thinking will remain steeped in shame. Offering a new mode of postcolonial reading, The Event of Postcolonial Shame demands a literature and a criticism that acknowledge their own ethical deficiency without seeking absolution from it.

The novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie’s phantasmagoric epic of an unnamed country that is “not quite Pakistan.” In this dazzling tale of an ongoing duel between the families of two men—one a celebrated wager of war, the other a debauched lover of pleasure—Rushdie brilliantly portrays a world caught between honor and humiliation —“shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.” Shame is an astonishing story that grows more timely by the day.

A funny, daring, bawdy and incredibly honest memoir from the anti-ageist, anti-body shaming, pro-sex advocate and erotic provocateur. Over the course of his 40-year career in show business, David Pevsner has done it all. He’s acted on Broadway, off-Broadway, in independent films and on numerous TV network shows including Grey’s Anatomy, Modern Family and Criminal Minds. As he continues his career in entertainment, Pevsner has also dedicated himself to exploring his deepest sexual fantasies. In his late 30s he became a mature male escort and over the last several years has attracted a large international fan base through his blog of erotic photographs celebrating nudity and sexuality. Damn Shame is David Pevsner’s incredible story and is a passionate and poignant look at one man’s journey from a thin, shy boy ashamed of his body and sexuality to a defiant, fearless everyman exploring his erotic desires, everything from leather and S&M to nude/erotic/hardcore modelling. Along the way, he fights back against society’s demonization of gay sex, body shaming and ageism while pursuing his own very personal definition of success and seeking love, validation and self-esteem. Damn Shame gives a loud and powerful voice to a generation of mature men who have been conditioned to believe from society (and especially younger members of the gay community) that they are sexually irrelevant, old and undesirable. Pevsner’s life story goes in directions that many couldn’t imagine, but the lessons learned through his experiences will resonate with readers of every age.