Learning from Shame

Anglo-Saxon England , 2013

An investigation of Ælfric's shame-vocabulary allows us to divide his shame concept into three areas: being (a)shamed, active shaming, and the shameful. The prototypical scenario of shame is humiliation or exposure before others. However, Ælfric asks his audience to imagine this kind of public, worldly shame in relation to failures to live up to Christian ideals; he thus encourages the ethicization and psychologization of shame. In addition, readers are invited to read to find Christian moral symbolism in narratives of shaming, while the emotive label of ‘shameful’ cues rejection and disgust towards what is wrong and pagan. Ælfric's appeals to shame promote self-scrutiny and the performance of a Christian identity. With respect to Anglo-Saxon shame in general, Ælfric offers a case-study in the flexibility of shame and its importance as a mode of knowing and performing the self.

1993

The Review of English Studies

Section 1 examines four reasons most commonly adduced to support the claim that guilt is superior to shame, both psychologically and morally: a) While guilt expresses a concern for others shame is a self-centered and selfish emotion. b) While guilt appeals to autonomy shame is linked to heteronomy. c) Shame is not a reactive attitude, like guilt, indignation, blame, resentment, but an objective attitude, like disdain or disgust. d) While guilt invites us to second-person responses, shame inhibits them. The second part of the paper (sections 2 and 3) addresses Williams’s analysis of the role of shame in ancient Greek literature and philosophy. Section 2 is dedicated to Williams’s response to the objections concerning selfishness and shallowness and to discussing his reply to the charge that since shame belongs to the objective attitudes it tends to inhibit second-person responses. Section 3 concentrates on Williams’s reflections on heteronomy by focusing on the attitude of others in shame and on the role played by the internalized other.

2012

This dissertation argues that eighteenth-century fiction problematizes the relationships among virtue, modesty, and shame. Where the conduct manual and the moral novel demonize the shameless female subject, women writers such as Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Charlottle Lennox consistently decouple shame from virtue to expose the limitations of the virtuous principles in the world of the conduct manual and moral novel.

The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman, ed. Cole and Galloway, 2014

2019

In this paper, I will bring together a theological and philosophical analysis of shame in the book of Revelation. It is a theological analysis in the sense that it delves into the text with an eye towards the broader biblical theme of shame and takes into account the theological influence of the Hebrew Bible on the author of Revelation. It is philosophical in the sense that it attempts to give a more nuanced understanding of the feeling of shame found in Revelation and utilizes a few influential philosophical theories in order to do so. I will argue that, in this book, shame appears in contexts of divine judgment and is symbolized in the image of nakedness. I will also argue for three characteristics of shame that seem to be implicit in Revelation.

This paper focuses on the ways in which perceptions and experiences of guilt and shame are shaped by political conceptions of who belongs to the more guilty and shameful parties. Guilt is ambiguous between guilt as the fact of having done something wrong, and guilt as a felt experience. Likewise shame can be felt even when there is nothing to be ashamed of. I will examine guilt and shame and the apparent expectation and need to take these emotions on when one is not directly implicated. This phenomenon is the converse of the refusal to accept guilt when one is actually culpable, a danger with the concept of collective guilt that Hannah Arendt points out. 2 I use the debate between Karl Jaspers and Arendt over guilt and responsibility, as well as Jean-Paul Sartre's and Giorgio Agamben's work on shame, to develop an account of the political aspects of perceived and felt guilt and shame in people who are oppressed.

In comparing the A and B texts in The Dream Thought of "Piers Plowman,' Elizabeth Kirk asks why Langland did not scrap the A Vita. This essay extends Kirk's analysis by showing that Langland revises the first two passus of the Vita to emphasize the importance of charity or grace and the limitations of wit and will in attaining salvation.

Yearbook of Langland Studies, 2019

This essay considers the temporality of salvation in Piers Plowman through the mechanics of lolling and hanging-modes of temporal and somatic suspension that disrupt the teleological operations of redemption. Bringing Elizabeth Freeman's discussion of chrononormative time-the temporal arrangements that have dominion over life-into the soteriology of Piers Plowman, this article sees the temporal maneuver of lolling as a confrontation to a salvific system built on waiting. It is the asynchrony of waiting that produces precariousness and this temporal pause shows its effects on the body. Those who depend on-literally hang and loll on-Christ's return must wait in expectation of his coming, but have no promise, only hope, of a salvific future. This essay suggests that the temporal schematics of lolling and hanging reveal the inequities of salvific politics and expose the precariousness of temporally-bound subjects that institutional powers benefit from. As a temporal marker, lolling can stand for a variety of suspended actions: an imitation of Christ's suffering on the cross, an idle worker, a hanged felon, or a retroactive redemption, to name a few. The poem identifies the suspended pause of lolling as both necessary for and an obstruction to Christ's return. In this way, lolling makes manifest the asynchronicity that a quest for Truth requires because not all who loll and hang can access salvation. Piers Plowman takes seriously the precariousness of lolling subjects and questions how those who are suspended in time can dowel and secure a spot in a salvific future.