Shame in Contemporary You-Narration - by Denise Wong (Hardcover)

About the Book

Argues that temporality and affect are critical dimensions of the proliferation of second-person narratives in the twenty-first century.

Book Synopsis

In fiction, you-narratives written in the last decade across the world parody the form of second-person address found in advertising, self-help and 'how-to' books while anticipating shame and culpability. To establish the significance of affect, this book returns to second-person narrative theory's neglected origins in the theory of autobiography. This book examines the use of you across media: novels and memoirs by Paul Auster, Carmen Maria Machado, Alejandro Zambra, Vendela Vida, Christine Angot, Clarice Lispector, Charles Yu, and Caleb Azumah Nelson; poems by Claudia Rankine and Phoebe Waller-Bridge's play and television series Fleabag (2016-19). These texts are brought into dialogue with narratology, philosophy, literary criticism and critical race theory to illustrate how the second-person pronoun's capacity to address the real-world reader inevitably renders such narratives a site for political and ethical contestation.

Review Quotes

Denise Wong's new book on shame and 'you-narratives' is deeply researched and highly insightful. Theoretically informed and critically astute, the book offers sensitive explorations of narratological properties and structures, as well as nuanced discussions of the political and ethical workings of the use of 'you' across a range of cultural forms and discourses.--Ben Davies, University of Portsmouth