A Landscape of Shame: Exploring the Digital Space in Contemporary British Fiction

Burn, Katherine (2025) A Landscape of Shame: Exploring the Digital Space in Contemporary British Fiction. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This thesis seeks to unite phenomenology and metamodernism through an investigation of shame in contemporary British fiction. Due to the rise of social media platforms, the way we communicate online has shaped how we converse in real-life as our reduced attention span is reinforced by technology’s ‘blinkered preference for familiarity, similarity and proximity.’1 Affect can no longer be conceptualised through interpersonal transactions when we consider how the content we consume shapes our world – in short, shame constructs a digital landscape, whilst operating within it. Philosophers and psychologists have explored both the positive and negative aspects of shame, with the primary group admitting its beneficial moral function. Whilst acts of public shaming generally do not provoke long-lasting change (and can prompt further damage to the self) our inhibitions can serve a purpose within a cohesive society. Chronic shame, however, as an endured state impairs functioning and, if left unresolved, is compensated against. This compensatory system, often existing on a spectrum of narcissism, is increasing at alarming rates as individuals are becoming more isolated. Using Heidegger’s phenomenology, I extend Rudi Visker’s claim that shame ‘shares a similar topos to anxiety’2, revealing an emotion that, when acknowledged, reconstructs a new understanding of self that directly impacts the form of contemporary texts. In a society that stigmatises vulnerability whilst simultaneously producing a background of competition and envy, shame fluctuates between experience and avoidance. This movement, I argue, expands van den Akker and Vermeulen’s metamodern structure of feeling, that is ‘characterised by an oscillating in-betweenness.’ 3 Using the work of Eley Williams and Tom McCarthy, I reveal shame’s impact through an analysis of language and movement that embeds our experience in a digital world. 1 Alice Bennett, Contemporary Fictions of Attention: Reading and Distraction in the Twenty-First Century (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), p. 12. 2 Rudi Visker, The Inhuman Condition: Looking for Difference after Levinas and Heidegger (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), p. 10. 3 Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen, ‘Periodising the 2000s, or, the Emergence of Metamodernism’, in Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect and Depth After Postmodernism, ed. by Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons and Timotheus Vermeulen (London: Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd, 2017), pp. 1-19 (p. 10).