Abstract:

The publications of the American scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick between 1993 and 2003 contribute to the burgeoning of literary affect studies in the Western academia. Combining psychologist Silvan Tomkins’s affect theory and Michael Franz Basch’s discussion on narcissism, Sedgwick reconstructs the destructive self-experience of shame as a politically productive affect. As a strong embodied experience, shame not only efficiently questions the personal identity, but also constantly negotiates the relationship between the self and the other. Through the example of shame, Sedgwick advances debates about “the politics of discomfort” in the field of affect studies. The exploration of the role of interpersonal relationship – as opposed to social structure – in political transformation also resembles her call for the shift of critical practice from “paranoid reading” to “reparative reading”.

Key words: shame, reparative reading, affect studies, literary criticism