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| Shame (Photo credit: Joe Gatling) |
I'm supposed to be describing one of the sources I am using for my bibliography and for my literature review, and I think I'm going to do this as a kind of draft for this book's section of the lit review, just to save some time. Please bear with me: I will be taking out most references to myself when I revise it. And, I apologize for not being able to figure out how to do a hanging indentation.
Fox, Pamela. Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890-1945. Durham: Duke UP, 1994.
I was immediately surprised by this book: I looked in the index for "script theory" or some variation thereof, but there was nothing about it at all. There was an entry for shame theory, so I went to that and discovered the reason for the earlier omission, which is that Pamela Fox a. is only interested in people in large numbers (like the working class, for example), and b. does not think that script theory has anything to offer in such cases or does not know it exists, which seems unlikely, as she writes, "[shame theory] has offered little to contemporary scholars searching for nuanced, respectful approaches to class cultural forms. And in its traditional guises, it has little to offer me here" (10). Yes, that's right. She's written a book about shame in literature based entirely on a model that ignores a fairly large body of theory, dismissing it as "notoriously out of favor" (10), a status that has changed dramatically since the time that she published her book. However, her model (definitely anti-psychoanalytic, sort of pro-anthropological) is not quite specific enough to stand in for all the ideas she has rejected, and it shows when she gets down to analyzing novels of the period in question.
In the years since 1994, a number of important examinations of shame in literature have been published, adding to the body of theory and opening new possiblities of shame theory as a critical approach to literature. None of these follow Fox's model; nor will I, as her approach does not add anything useful to the model I am constructing.
I guess this shows you how I write a first draft-- lots of repetition and rethinking in the middle, so I have to edit a lot. On the other hand, I think I've gotten out a lot of what I want to say about her book, so I'll consider it useful.
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