Literature and Ideology of Shame in the Secondary English Classroom

Reconstructing and unpacking dialogic classroom exchanges, this article examines a high school English elective, Literature of Shame, in which students navigate inherited moral frameworks and modern digital anxieties through the lens of classical literature. As students analysed Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, they also bridged complex psychological and philosophical concepts. By engaging with Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘shudder’ of the ‘look’, Louis Althusser’s ideological ‘hail’ and Joan Didion’s ‘discipline of self-respect’, our discourse explored shame as a pervasive societal ideology. Ultimately, through textual analysis, linguistic reframing and personal reflection, students began to dismantle stagnant, ontological shame, transforming it into manoeuvrable actions that foster agency, ethical growth and critical self-respect.