Scenes Of Shame

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

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

In this classic volume, Kaufman synthesizes object relations theory, interpersonal theory, and, in particular, Silvan Tompkins's affect theory, to provide a powerful and multidimensional view of shame. Using his own clinical experience, he illustrates the application of affect theory to general classes of shame-based syndromes including compulsive; schizoid, depressive, and paranoid; sexual dysfunction; splitting; and sociopathic. This second edition includes two new chapters in which Dr. Kaufman presents shame as a societal dynamic and shows its impact on culture. He examines the role of shame in shaping the evolving identity of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, and expands his theory of governing scenes. This new edition will continue to be of keen interest to clinical psychiatrists as well as graduate students.

Essays examining the role of shame as an American cultural practice and how public shaming enforces conformity and group coherence. On any given day in America’s news cycle, stories and images of disgraced politicians and celebrities solicit our moral indignation, their misdeeds fueling a lucrative economy of shame and scandal. Shame is one of the most coercive, painful, and intriguing of human emotions. Only in recent years has interest in shame extended beyond a focus on the subjective experience of this emotion and its psychological effects. The essays collected here consider the role of shame as cultural practice and examine ways that public shaming practices enforce conformity and group coherence. Addressing abortion, mental illness, suicide, immigration, and body image among other issues, this volume calls attention to the ways shaming practices create and police social boundaries; how shaming speech is endorsed, judged, or challenged by various groups; and the distinct ways that shame is encoded and embodied in a nation that prides itself on individualism, diversity, and exceptionalism. Examining shame through a prism of race, sexuality, ethnicity, and gender, these provocative essays offer a broader understanding of how America’s discourse of shame helps to define its people as citizens, spectators, consumers, and moral actors. “An eclectic anthology, it offers the readers more than one argument and perspective, which makes the volume itself lively and rich.” —Ron Scapp, coeditor of Fashion Statements: On Style, Appearance, and Reality

This book addresses the eclipse of shame in Christian theology by showing how shame emerges in Christian texts and practice in ways that can be neither assimilated into a discourses of guilt nor dissociated from embodiment. Stephanie N. Arel argues that the traditional focus on guilt obscures shame by perpetuating the image of the lonely sinner in guilt. Drawing on recent studies in affect and attachment theories to frame the theological analysis, the text examines the theological anthropological writings of Augustine and Reinhold Niebuhr, the interpretation of empathy by Edith Stein, and moments of touch in Christian praxis. Bringing the affective dynamics of shame to the forefront enables theologians and religious leaders to identify where shame emerges in language and human behavior. The text expands work in trauma theory, providing a multi-layered theological lens for engaging shame and accompanying suffering.

Combines shame studies and literary criticism to uncover new perspectives on Dostoevsky as writer and psychologist, with his lying characters as case studies.

Examines the intersection of shame, gender and writing in contemporary literatureConsiders the particular intersection of shame, gender and writing in literature produced since the 1990sViews shame as a constitutive factor in the social construction and experience of femininityAnalyses a diverse range of texts from pulp to literary fiction to life writing and autofiction, with a self-reflexive focus on the formal disjunctions produced by/in the writing of shame, and on the shame attending the act of writing itselfOffers political readings of neglected genres (lesbian pulp fiction), highly topical texts (like Kraus's I Love Dick and Knausgaard's My Struggle), and established authors (such as Mary Gaitskill, A.M. Homes, Rupert Thomson)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. It unpicks the complex triangulation of shame, gender and writing, and intervenes forcefully in feminist and queer debates of the last three decades. Starting from the premise that shame cannot be overcome or abandoned, and that femininity and shame are utterly and necessarily imbricated, Writing Shame examines writing that explores and inhabits this state of shame, considering the dissonant effects of such explorations on and beyond the page.

Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature provides a new and wide-ranging appraisal of shame in colonial and postcolonial literature in English. Bringing together young and established voices in postcolonial studies, these essays tackle shame and racism, shame and agency, shame and ethical recognition, the problem of shamelessness, the shame of willed forgetfulness. Linked by a common thread of reflections on shame and literary writing, the essays consider specifically whether the aesthetic and ethical capacities of literature enable a measure of stability or recuperation in the presence of shame’s destructive potential. The obscenity of the in-human, both in the colonial setting and in aftermaths that show little sign of abating, entails the acute significance of shame as a subject for continuing and urgent critical attention.