Shame On You

Beskrivelse

Shame and guilt are deeply human emotions that influence both individuals and societies. This book delves into these feelings through a literary lens, exploring their cultural shifts in Western and Scandinavian contexts.

An insightful look at how shame and guilt shape self-identity and social norms across time and literature.

Shame on You examines the nuances of shame and guilt, highlighting their roles as reflective and social emotions. While both emotions point to a failure in relation to shared norms, shame is tied to one’s self-identity, whereas guilt relates to specific actions affecting others.

The book surveys a broad range of authors, from 19th-century figures like Carlo Collodi and Henrik Ibsen to modernists such as Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Marguerite Duras, and extends to contemporary voices like Elizabeth Gilbert, Charlotte Roche, and Yahya Hassan.

Each chapter investigates how cultural perceptions of shame and guilt have evolved, illustrating this through contrasts such as the historical repression of sexuality versus today’s emphasis on pleasure. This shift also reflects changes in how individuals relate to themselves.

Although the primary approach is literary, the opening chapters provide theoretical and historical insights into these emotions, setting the stage for the analyses that follow.

The authors bring strong academic backgrounds to the work: Gorm Larsen is a Ph.D. and Associate Professor at Aalborg University’s Department of Communication and leads the Communication Dynamics research group. René Rasmussen, also Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst and Associate Professor Emeritus in Danish literature at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics.

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