Table Of ContentShame and Modern Writing
Shame and Modern Writing seeks to uncover the presence of shame in
and across an 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.
Barry Sheils is Assistant Professor in twentieth and twenty-first century
literature at Durham University, where he is also an associate director
of the Centre for Cultural Ecologies. He is the author of W.B. Yeats and
World Literature: The Subject of Poetry (Routledge), and co-editor of
Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject of Community (Palgrave).
Julie Walsh is Lecturer in Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the
University of Essex, and a psychoanalyst in private practice. She is the
author of Narcissism and Its Discontents (Palgrave), and co-editor of
Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject of Community (Palgrave). She
is also a member of The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis.
Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature
81 Multilingual Currents in Literature, Translation, and Culture
Edited by Rachael Gilmour and Tamar Steinitz
82 Rewriting the American Soul
Trauma, Neuroscience and the Contemporary Literary Imagination
Anna Thiemann
83 Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion
Bodies at Prayer
Naya Tsentourou
84 TransGothic in Literature and Culture
Edited by Jolene Zigarovich
85 Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture
Edited by Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz
86 Mediating Memory
Tracing the Limits of Memoir
Edited by Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles, and Sue Joseph
87 From Mind to Text
Continuities and Breaks Between Cognitive, Aesthetic and
Textualist Approaches to Literature
Bartosz Stopel
88 Attachment, Place, and Otherness in Nineteenth-Century
American Literature
New Materialist Representations
Jillmarie Murphy
89 Shame and Modern Writing
Edited by Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.
Shame and Modern Writing
Edited by
Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh
First published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
The right of Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh to be identified as
the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for
their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
CIP data has been applied for.
ISBN: 978-1-138-06727-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-15875-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Notes on Contributors ix
1 Introduction: Shame and Modern Writing 1
BARRY SHEILS AND JULIE WALSH
2 Montaigne’s Writing: “Honteux Insolent”? 33
ELIzABETH GUILD
3 Shamefulness and Modernity: Remarks on
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 50
THOMAS OSBORNE
4 Lyric Shame 68
DENISE RILEY
5 Writing to Spare One’s Blushes: Jean Jacques Rousseau’s
Confessions and the Automation of Confidence 73
CHRISTOPHER JOHN MüLLER
6 Between Shame and Guilt: Lord Jim and the
Confounding of Distinctions 91
JAMES BROWN
7 Black and Ashamed: Deconstructing Race in Ralph
Ellison’s Invisible Man 112
zLATAN FILIPOvIC
8 The Body that Race Built: Shame, Trauma and Lack in
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and God Help the Child 133
SHELDON GEORGE
vi Contents
9 “The Lyric a Form / of Shame Management”? 156
JOHN GOODBY
10 Vulnerability and Vulgarity: The Uses of Shame
in the Work of Dodie Bellamy 165
KAYE MITCHELL
11 Writing Shame and Disgust in Susan Gubar’s Memoir
of a Debulked Woman 184
J. BROOKS BOUSON
12 On Writing-Up: Shame and Clinical Writing 198
OLIvER SACKS AND JULIE WALSH
13 Shame and Plagiarism 207
CHARLES TURNER
14 “Dance Like Nobody’s Watching”: The Mediated Shame
of Academic Publishing 221
MARTIN PAUL EvE
15 Cultural Capital and the Shameful University 236
THOMAS DOCHERTY
Index 253
Acknowledgments
Chapter 2, “Montaigne’s Writing: ‘Honteux Insolent’?” by Elizabeth
Guild was first published in Montaigne Studies, XXvII, 1–2 (2015),
99–112, and is republished with the kind permission of the editor.
Chapter 12, ‘On Writing-Up: Shame and Clinical Writing’ by Julie Walsh
with Oliver Sacks was first published in Exchanges: the Warwick Re-
search Journal, 1 (2013), and is republished with permission of the author.
A symposium on ‘Shame and the Act of Writing’ in 2014 funded by
the Institute of Advanced Study and the Humanities Research Centre at
Warwick University gave this work its initial impetus; we are grateful
to all those who participated. We would also like to thank Marc Botha,
Geoff Gilbert, and Arthur Rose for their contributions, witting or not,
to the evolution of this volume, and Rick de villiers at Durham Univer-
sity whose sharp and timely editorial work was truly helpful.
Notes on Contributors
J. Brooks Bouson is Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago
in the United States. In her scholarship and teaching, she has fo-
cused on twentieth and twenty-first century women’s literature and
she has a long-standing interest in the empathic dynamics of the
reader/text transaction, which grows out of her application of Heinz
Kohut’s psychoanalytic theory to the study of literature in her book
The Empathic Reader: A Study of the Narcissistic Character and
the Drama of the Self. More recently, she has turned to the study of
emotions in literature, shame in literature, and trauma and narra-
tive. In addition to her book The Empathic Reader, she has published
scholarly books on contemporary women writers, including Brutal
Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the
Novels of Margaret Atwood; Quiet As It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma,
and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison; Jamaica Kincaid: Writing
Memory, Writing Back to the Mother; Embodied Shame: Uncovering
Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writings; and Shame and
the Aging Woman: Confronting and Resisting Ageism in Contempo-
rary Women’s Writings. She also is the editor of four recent critical
collections: Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood; Margaret Atwood:
The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake; Critical
Insights: Emily Dickinson; and Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale.
James Brown is Associate Research Fellow in the Politics Department at
Birkbeck College, University of London, having previously been a lec-
turer at Middlesex University. He is the convenor of the Guilt work-
ing group in the Birkbeck Centre for Social Research. He publishes at
the intersection of cultural theory and political philosophy on topics
such as liberal democracy, violence and romantic feeling.
Thomas Docherty is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Stud-
ies at Warwick University. He specializes in the philosophy of literary
criticism, in critical theory, and in cultural history in relation primarily
to European philosophy and literatures. Recent work has been done on
matters of cultural policy related to international higher education. He
has published over ten books, including: Confessions: The Philosophy
