19th September, Shame and the Act of Writing
Paper Abstracts
In addition to position papers from Denise Riley, John Goodby, and Charles Turner, and a keynote
address from Geoff Gilbert, the following speakers will be presenting their work.
James Brown, Birkbeck College, University of London: ‘Shame / writing / speech: Joseph Conrad
and meeting oneself’.
This paper starts from a moment in Lord Jim (1900). Jim, having deserted the Patna, leaving its cargo
of 800 pilgrims to perish, has had his officer’s certificate cancelled. The narrator, Marlow, invites Jim
to his room, not to speak, but to leave him alone. Jim is shamed for dereliction of duty. Marlow’s
kindness is to write, and to become so absorbed in his writing that he treats Jim as though he were
invisible.
As he writes, Marlow reflects: a word carries far very far deals destruction through time as the
bullets go flying through space. Taking shame in Benedict’s sense, it might seem that the inner
space of writing has little truck with shame. Yet writing is public too. Even if the writing self can, in
some respects, be considered effaced, writing may also objectify the self, the self at a particular
moment, albeit still identified with oneself. Marlow’s formulation raises the possibility that, if
written words are like bullets, then they might strike one’s later self. Then one might experience not
guilt, but shame both of and before oneself. The paper will explore this in relation to Conrad’s
complex negotiation between the spoken and the written word.
Mary Flannery, University of Lausanne: ‘I’m Not Worthy: Shame and Writing After Chaucer’.
One of the most distinctive qualities of fifteenth-century English literature is how it engages with the
legacy of Geoffrey Chaucer. From Thomas Hoccleve (c. 1368-1426) to John Lydgate (c. 1370-1451)
to John Clanvowe (1341-1391), fifteenth-century authors persistently situate themselves in relation
to the man they dub the ‘father of English poetry’ and the ‘finder’ of verse in the English tongue.
Their negotiation of Chaucer’s legacy combines effusive praise with concentrated self-abasement:
fifteenth-century poets repeatedly profess their lack of skill, their unworthiness, and their general
‘dullness’ by way of a prologue to their own attempts to reproduce the success of their predecessor.
Contemporary scholarship has long been familiar with this phenomenon, often termed fifteenthcentury literature’s ‘modesty topos’ or ‘humility topos’. Yet while this strategy is typically
understood as a way for fifteenth-century authors to inscribe themselves into Chaucer’s literary
legacy, no attention has been paid to how this strategy cast shame as the defining emotion for postChaucerian authors. This paper argues that fifteenth-century poetry’s espousal of post-Chaucerian
modesty ultimately made the ability to feel shame a crucial prerequisite for writing after Chaucer.
Philippa Lewis, University of Cambridge: ‘Shameful Shyness and the Fate of the Writer in fin-desiècle France’.
What is the relationship between shame and shyness? Is shyness something to be ashamed of? And
is shyness more or less shameful for writers? This paper addresses these questions in the context of
fin-de-siècle France. It begins with a comparison between two key moral and medical texts on the
topic, Ludovic Dugas’ Shyness: A Psychological and Moral Study [1898] and Paul Hartenberg’s The
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Shy and Shyness [1901]. In these texts, the capacity to feel shame is seen as positive in itself.
Shyness, however, is an erroneous sort of shame, bordering on arrogance, which must be cured.
Both texts make a distinction between ‘spontaneous’ and ‘systematic’ shyness, and associate the
latter with writers. Dugas exonerates shyness for writers, suggesting that it often produces art. Like
Dugas, Hartenberg relies heavily on literary representations and testimonies of shyness in his
psychological analysis. Yet he argues that for a writer to indulge in his or her shyness is to deviate
from the public role he or she must play in society. In a period in which the figure of the author was
increasingly visible, and the attack on shyness more persistent, the likelihood and yet at the same
time shamefulness of shyness increased proportionally.
Jenny Mak, University of Warwick: ‘Shame, Body and Author-ity in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy’.
This paper considers how the concept of shame relating to the act of writing plays out in Caribbean
author Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Lucy. It particularly explores the significations of the moment when
the protagonist, Lucy Potter’s, act of writing her own name in a diary evokes an intense bodily
reaction: ‘as I looked at this sentence a great wave of shame came over me and I wept and wept so
much that the tears fell on the page and caused all the words to become one great big blur’. This
paper proposes that Lucy’s shame—experienced through her subjugated body as a West Indian
woman newly arrived into North America to work as an au pair—represents the weight of historical
feminine guilt that modern black women writers carry within their bodies as they write. Drawing on
the critical writings of bell hooks, Audre Lorde and Trinh T. Minh-ha, this paper further argues that in
Lucy, Kincaid offers the kinesthetic, erotic, intersectional female body as a conduit through which
the ‘shameful’ act of writing can be performed and processed. In doing so, the modern black woman
writer is empowered to ‘name’ and ‘author-ise’ herself, thus enabling her to enunciate a particular
kind of female experience that is complex in its cross-culturity, intersectional subjugation and deep
psychical scars.
Alessandra Micalizzi, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart: ‘#shameonme: Twitter and the
blushing practices in the Digital Era’.
One of the most common uses of the Net is to share narratives about the Everyday life. This
continued translation in words and images of personal experiences is the expression of the new way
of living and using the Net, considered, more and more, a crowded, participated and emotionally
thick context. The paper aims at underlining some narrative practices emerging from the sharing of
emotional experiences. More specifically the focus is addressed to shame and embarrassment: these
emotions are typically situated, linked with a specific context. In the case of digital environments, we
observe the translation of these sentiments in narrative fragments that are shared with personal
contacts. We describe the results of an explorative research about on-line shaming. The study is
focused on the qualitative content analysis of tweets posted on line during July-December 2012 with
hashtags semantically linked with “shame”. The results shows the narrative characteristics of the
socialization of this family of emotions, according with the practices of appropriation of the digital
devices and contexts. The Net becomes the refuge from the situated blush and, at the same time,
the digital space where some new kinds of embarrassing situations can take place, undermining the
new forms of digital decency.
Kaye Mitchell, University of Manchester: ‘‘Grotesque, unspeakable’: Shame, vulnerability, and the
autobiographical fashioning of female sexual subjectivity’.
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This paper emerges from a larger project (a monograph) addressing the gender and sexual politics of
shame, and the triangulation of desire, shame and writing in diverse contemporary literary texts.
That project proceeds from two key intuitions about the writing of shame: that it may not
necessarily prove redemptive or allow shame to be vitiated; and that it produces various formal
challenges and disruptions, arising from what Timothy Bewes has identified as the ‘tension between
the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of literature’ (Bewes 2011).
The paper will examine various recent female-authored memoirs, considering questions of
confession, narration and identity: the construction of a precarious narrating subject, both
constituted and undone by a shame that ‘cannot adequately be accounted for by language’ (Bewes
2011), through narrative forms that therefore refuse the consolations of coherence and linearity. In
addition, I will discuss the fraught erotics of shame and vulnerability in the narration of a female
desire that is too often viewed as ‘grotesque’ and ‘unspeakable’ (Kraus 1997). If ‘a form of shame
always attends the writer’ (Probyn 2005), what (more) is at stake in the autobiographical fashioning
of female sexual subjectivity?
Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (1997) will be at the centre of the paper, though other texts under
consideration may include: Katherine Angel, Unmastered (2012); Toni Bentley, The Surrender (2004);
Marie Calloway, what purpose did i serve in your life? (2013); Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?
(2012); Catherine Millet, The Sexual Life of Catherine M (2001).
Douglas Morrey, University of Warwick: ‘Nothing to be ashamed of? Writing depression in
contemporary French literature’.
The increasing awareness of mental health has led to a cultural consensus in the developed world
that depression is nothing to be ashamed of, but rather an illness requiring treatment or
management. Recently, however, critics such as Mathieu Bellahsen have suggested that ‘mental
health’ has become a new tool of normalization and control aimed at reducing the impact of mental
illness on economic productivity. In this context, does depression become, once again, a source of
stigma and shame as sufferers are condemned as ‘unproductive’?
This paper will examine the prevalence of depression in contemporary French literature, focusing on
authors such as Olivier Adam, Nina Bouraoui, Marina de Van and Brigitte Giraud, and asking the
following questions: does this literature reflect the contemporary medical discourse of management
of depression, or does it provide a space of resistance to that discourse? What is the place of
medication in the contemporary literature of depression? What are the gender politics of depression
in contemporary literature? Is there a ‘depressive discourse’ at work in contemporary literature and
is it at odds with the drive for narrative? If so, does this result in a further dimension of shame for
the author and how is this shame articulated and incorporated within the text?
Christopher John Müller, Cardiff University: ‘Composing the Self: Shame as a Technological
Passion’.
This paper advances the idea that shame can be considered a passion rooted in a particular
relationship to technology. Building on Jacques Derrida’s and Max Schelers’ observation that
only a habitually clothed and covered being can experience itself exposed in shame, I consider the
generative relationship between the feeling of shame and attempts to fix the self in writing. In
particular, I will respond to a passage of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions in which he outlines
why he writes: “I would love society like others, if I were not sure of showing myself not only at a
disadvantage, but as completely different from what I am. The part that I have taken of writing and
hiding myself is precisely the one that suits me. If I were present, one would never know what I was
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worth”. In an attempt to escape the peril of being stripped of a self in headless, un-composed
speech Rousseau employs a trick of reason when presenting himself to others. He slips on the cover
of writing and gives himself command over the very (self-) presence that is so precariously exposed
in shame by reaching out to a technological supplement (i.e. a pen). By focusing on the two levels of
solitude Rousseau evokes – the solitude of voluntarily hiding oneself in acts of representation and
the one of finding oneself caught-out in shame and exposed against one’s will – this paper outlines
how shame can be conceived of as a technological passion.
Jean Owen: ‘Vivisecting Shame through the Act of Writing’.
In 2011, I interviewed Kathryn Harrison about her controversial memoir, The Kiss: A Memoir (1997),
which narrates the four-year incestuous affair she had with her father. Harrison claims that her
intention was ‘to vivisect myself, to look inside and see what I find’. She continues: ‘I wanted the
book to be called “A Confession” rather than “A Memoir” because that was how I experienced the
writing of it: coming clean after years of secrecy and shame’. The Kiss follows her earlier and first
novel, Thicker Than Water (1991), a fictionalised and highly embroidered version of the sparse
memoir. As she points out: ‘The publication of Thicker Than Water almost demanded my writing The
Kiss […] Writing about incest as a novel was a recanting, saying in essence: it’s not true; I made it up.
Recasting my history as fiction struck me more and more as a betrayal: of my past, of myself, and of
other women. It said more about my sense of shame behind the act of writing’. In re-visiting this
incestuous terrain, however, Harrison does not offer any clear distinction between the
autobiographical novel and the memoir. In this paper I shall be discussing some of the issues raised
in our interview in respect of notions of shame, coming clean and cutting open of the past through
the act of writing.
Michael Rowland, University of Sussex: ‘‘That war of duties’: Henry Mackenzie and the shame of
writing novels’.
The Scottish lawyer and writer Henry Mackenzie was responsible for one of the most popular novels
of the eighteenth century, The Man of Feeling. Published in 1771, it became a runaway success and
was reprinted over and over again in subsequent years. But by the 1780s, Mackenzie had abandoned
the sentimental novel for the more direct periodical. I read Mackenzie’s move away from novel
writing as motivated by a deep-seated ambivalence as to the social usefulness of sentimental fiction,
especially in light of its enormous popularity. Through analysis of issue no. 20 of The Lounger,
Mackenzie’s periodical, in which he reflects on ways in which novel writing has ‘form[ed] a mistaken
and pernicious system of morality’ and also of his famous novel, I argue that Mackenzie tries to
rationalize the inability of novel writers to control what their texts do once out of their hands. I also
argue that even in the structure and form of The Man of Feeling, it is possible to read a sense of
writerly shame. The sentimental novel, as the example of Mackenzie shows, is a wayward child
seemingly bent on shaming its parent.
Agata Sikora, University of Warsaw (visiting scholar at The Centre for the History of Emotions,
QMUL): ‘Shameful confession as a weapon, shameful confession as a gift. Violating taboos and the
dialectic of modern sincerity’.
In modern Western culture, in which sincerity is a crucial social value and a communicational
assumption in the private sphere, divulging shameful secrets possesses ambivalent power. On one
hand an individual who confesses such a secret makes themselves vulnerable to humiliation, on the
other they prove their courage and authenticity, pose a challenge to receivers and demonstrate
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commitment and trust to them. Disclosure is treated as a proof of sincerity, but at the same time it
may be interpreted as a rhetorical strategy with the aim of influencing the receivers.
In my paper I would like to trace the emergence of this ambiguity by analysing two cases where
sexual taboos were violated by authors rooted in sentimental values. The first one is Jean Jacques
Rousseau's provocative public exposure performed in his famous autobiography (1782); the second
is a confession of his sexual fantasies by Juliusz Słowacki, one of the greatest Polish poets, written in
private correspondence to his mother (1830'). My aim is to show the complex interplay between
shame, intimacy and sincerity which underlies the modern idea of autobiographical writing. I will put
special emphasis on the secularisation of sexual taboos and try to define the difference between
pre-modern and modern concepts of shame.
Rebecca Webb & Valerie Hey, University of Sussex: ‘The Social Orders of Supervision : Ignorance
and Ignomy’.
What is shame in the supervisory encounter, especially as it frames the mimetic quality of engaging
with writing in a supervisor/supervisee relationship? Is shame that which must be ‘avoided’ at all
costs, something damaging and eroding of any worthwhile sense of self? Does this mean that it
must be named (and shamed) at the outset and swept away with a deft swish of a supervisory
broom? Or, rather, is it that which must be countenanced and acknowledged in the processes of
subjectification (Butler, 1995) that constitute an emergence of a ‘getting to know’ in any supervisory
relationship worth its salt?
In this paper doctoral candidate Rebecca Webb and her supervisor Valerie Hey will draw on their
own empirical materials. They will consider some of the writing they have shared as part of their
supervisory sessions together. They will do this in order to think through the role of shame in the
shaping and honing of different kinds of subjecthood that have been rendered possible in their
encounters. Indeed, they will explore shame as something which is inherently unstable and yet
potentially productive and affirming, born out of the opacity and tantalizing quality of writing itself.
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