Scenes of Shame

The significance of shame as a critical human emotion has come to be recognized in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and psychology. Scenes of Shame brings this body of theory to bear on literary and philosophical representations of shame. The contributors explore the role of shame as an important affect in the psychodynamics of a wide range of literary and philosophical works, including essays on Kierkegaard, Hawthorne, George Eliot, Nietzsche, Lawrence, Faulkner, Sexton, and Toni Morrison. The book also includes an analysis of the problem of shame in student lifewriting in the classroom, and testifies to the importance of affect in philosophy and literature, as well as to the way in which imaginative writers can clarify and enrich our understanding of an emotion that, as Silvan Tomkins claims, "strikes deepest" into the human heart.