Abstract

In the recent wave of autobiographical writing that combines personal narrative with social analysis and political reflection, this dissertation reads the shame depicted in the works of Stephanie Land, Édouard Louis, and Deniz Ohde as representative of a relational rupture. This shame surfaces where a social verdict enters the autodiegetic narrator’s voice while remaining someone else’s. I argue that these texts stage shame as the affective form their protagonists’ low position in a hierarchical society takes, and that the literary engagement with shame represents an attempt of de-privatizing the isolating, affective responses to a historic reassignment of responsibility for systemic failure from the public to the private sphere. I trace the relational rupture on three levels: the bureaucratic (between narrator and state); the intersubjective (between narrator and another character); and self-relational (between narrator and an internalized other). The workfare apparatus in Land’s texts solicits the self-narrative of a ‘deserving’ benefit recipient, displacing redistributive claims with claims for recognition the apparatus can grant or refuse. Louis’s second-person address represents the circulation of shame between the narrator and his father. Ohde’s narrator recalls introjecting the distinctions that constitute her subjugation before finding the language of her narration. Reading these texts finds that the ambivalence of shame and recognition grows more diffuse and its source more obscured the more constitutively a text represents the subjugation of the protagonist’s self to be.

Committee Chair

Erin McGlothlin

Committee Members

André Fischer; Aylin Bademsoy; Matt Erlin; Melanie Micir

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Author's Department

German & Comparative Literature

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

8-13-2026

Language

English (en)

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Available for download on Saturday, August 12, 2028

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