From Shame to Shaming: towards an Analysis of Shame Narratives

Abstract

This paper examines shame in three narratives involving the social self and the evaluative perception of that self. The semiotic square is used for analysing some of the conceptualizations of shame and highlighting the structural relations of the shame phenomenon in narrative. The stance of this paper is that shame is a moral emotion which results from two main evaluative perceptions, involving moral sentiment and social reputation. In support of this claim, different aspects of shame are analysed in three types of narratives from different socio-cultural contexts.

Keywords

• shame
• moral emotion
• shame narrative