‘Stories of shame, stories for shame: fiction and self-harm’

Описание: The Shame and Medicine Project presents the Shame and Medicine in Literature Seminar Series, hosted by the Centre for the Cultures and Environments of Health.

Shame, Elspeth Probyn tells us, ‘is a painful thing to write about’ (‘Writing Shame’, 2010). This Seminar Series interrogates the connections between the experience of shame and its literary representation, extending discussions initiated by the ‘Shame and Medicine’ thematic issue of Literature and Medicine, edited by Dr Arthur Rose and Professor Luna Dolezal.


Dr Veronica Heney (University of Durham)
12th February 2025, 13.00 – 14.00 GMT
TITLE: ‘Stories of shame, stories for shame: fiction and self-harm’

ABSTRACT: That self-harm is a shameful practice is often easily taken for granted. However, recent sociological work has called attention to the way in which self-harm’s shamefulness is actively constructed through narrative. This talk takes up that call, drawing on an innovative interdisciplinary method to weave together interview data and a close reading of Tim Blake Nelson’s 2015 film Anaesthesia. I will explore shame as contingent, relational, and actively brought into being, thus creating a more complex and nuanced account of the relation between shame, narrative, and self-harm. Specifically, I will attend to the location of shame in a ‘type’ of self-harming character, the significance of visibility and exposure in narratives of self-harm, the function of genre in invoking or communicating shame, and the uncertain relationship between de-stigmatisation and the enforcement of norms.