Shapes of Shame in Literature: International Conference Program

The conference features 61 authors with affiliations from 24 different countries: Algeria, Austria, Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Croatia, France, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Kosovo, Malaysia, Morocco, Philippines, Portugal, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, Tunisia, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.

Monday, June 15, 2026 (Live sessions)

8:00–9:00 Registration and welcome coffee

9:00–9:10 Opening Remarks

• Ivana Zajc, Katja Mihurko

9:10–10:00 Keynote Lecture

• Mónica Bolufer Peruga
  Gendered Narratives of National Pride and Shame: the Transnational and Transatlantic Travels of an Eighteenth-century Novel

10:00–10:30 Coffee break

10:30–12:30 (Section 1)

Section leader: Anja Mrak

Participants

• Sena Mihailović Milošević, Suzana Đorđević Pejović
  Shame as the Integrating Factor of Culture Dialogue in the Book Seven Seas and Three Oceans. Around the World by Jelena Dimitrijević
• Milena Mileva Blažić
  Three Phases of the Motif of Shame: A Comparative Analysis of Selected Fairy Tales in the Context of Martha Nussbaum’s Ethical Literary Theory and Žižek’s Theory of Violence
• Marijan Dović
  “Decadence, Lust, Blasphemy”: Responses to the Poetic Debuts of Ivan Cankar and Oton Župančič
• Katja Mihurko
  She Went into the Darkest Streets: Shame and Shaming in Slovenian Fin-de-Siècle Literature

12:30–13:30 Lunch

13:30–15:30 (Section 2)

Section leader: Leonora Flis

Participants

• Orsolya Thorday
  Narrative Modes of Remembering Shame: Reflections on Shame from Montaigne to Contemporary French Literature
• Dhanajay Tripathi
  “Morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist” – Shame and Subjectivity in Women’s Confessional Auto-fiction
• Mina Rahnamaei
  From Silence to Testimony: Shame and Power in Vanessa Springora’s Le Consentement
• Diana Košir, Maša Rolih
  “I'm a Bad Mother. But I’m Learning to Be a Good One.”: Representations of Female Shame at the Intersection of the Intimate and the Public in Contemporary Prose

15:30–16:00 Coffee Break

16:00–18:00 (Section 3)

Section leader: Ivana Zajc

Participants

• Ana Toroš
  Textual Strategies for Representing Ethnic Shame and Shaming in Slovene Trieste Prose of the 20th and 21st Centuries
• Redouane Khamar
  Driss Chaabi’s work of the poetics of shame
• Urh Ferlež
  Does Shame Die Slowly? Shame in Slovenian Postwar Authors in Argentina
• Anja Mrak
  Shame between Literary Representation and School Interpretation: Novels As If I Am Not There by Slavenka Drakulić and Speak, Silence by Kim Echlin

Tuesday, June 16, 2026 (Live sessions)

9:00–11:00 (Section 1)

Section leader: Darko Ilin

Participants

• Anja Hartl
  Queer Shame in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Ben Abderrezak Abdelnacer & Safia Khalaf
  Middle Eastern Homosexuality as a Site of Social and Personal Shame in Saleem Haddad’s Guapa (2016)
• Branislava Vičar
  “I Hope to Leave the Shape of My Teeth on the Skin”: Body Schemas in the Poetry Collection Sin svoje roke by Ingo Jesen Vitman Öri
• Tea Hvala
  “And I’m Making a Slut of Myself Too …”: Self-Shaming in Rikke Villadsen’s Comic Tatovøren og Klitoris (The Tattooist and the Clitoris)

11:00–12:30 (Section 2)

Section leader: Leonora Flis

Participants

• Boshko Koloski, Teo Radetič, Ivana Zajc, Katja Mihurko, Matthew Purver, Senja Pollak
  Tracing Shame Between the Lines: Modeling Implicit Emotion in Slovenian Novels Through Digital Humanities Methods
• Primož Mlačnik
  Shapes of Class Shame in Dijana Matković's Zakaj ne pišem (2021)
• Davorin Juhart
  Depicting Class Shame as a Form of Symbolic Violence in Literature
• Zied Smat
  The Inscription of the Political in Poetics: Class Shame and Gender Shame in Annie Ernaux, Marguerite Duras, and Édouard Louis

12:30–13:30 Lunch

13:30–15:00 (Section 3)

Section leader: Primož Mlačnik

Participants

• Lucija Mandić
  The Shaming Discourse of the “Malicious Realist Govekar” in Portrait Caricatures of Slovenian Women and Men Writers
• Maša Grdešić
  Autotheory and Shame: the Evolution of Kate Zambreno’s Writing
• Cora Alexandra Rok
  Shame and the Confessional Mode in 19th-Century French Literature

15:00–15:30 (Coffee Break)

15:30–17:30 (Section 4)

Section leader: Lucija Mandić

Participants

• Ivana Zajc
  Shame and Narrative: The Story Tantadruj by Ciril Kosmač from the Point of View of Disability Studies
• Barbara Bednjićki Rošer & Ines Voršič
  Picture Books as a Space for Understanding Shame in Children’s Literature
• Myrto Charvalia
  Shame and its extrication in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and God Help the Child(2015)

18:00 Bus trip to Goriška Brda

Wednesday, June 17, 2026 (Zoom sessions)

9:00–10:30 (Section 1)

Section leader: Darko Ilin

Participants

• Colin Cavendish-Jones
  The Shape of Shame in Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis
• Agnieszka Laddach
  “A Man of Desires:” Shame towards the Priest’s Homosexuality
• Martyna Miernecka
  Celibate longing, coastal space, and shame: Anna Iwaszkiewiczowa’s Cap Ferrat Episode (1925)

10:30–11:00 Coffee Break

11:00–12:30 (Section 2)

Section leader: TBD

Participants

• Erkin Kiryaman
  Narrating Shame: Unreliable Narration in Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World
• Rana Sağıroğlu
  Shame as a Readerly Labour in “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “To Room Nineteen”
• Victorița Encică
  Textual Strategies to Articulate and Describe Shame and the Feeling of Shame in Romanian Literature from the 20th Century

12:30–13:00 Lunch

13:00–14:30 (Section 3)

Section leader: Primož Mlačnik

Participants

• Mirko Sardelić: Shame and Guilt as Powerful Means of Social Control: Examples from Marija Jurić Zagorka’s works
• İsmail Kaygısız
  Shame as Social Pathology: Recognition, Downward Mobility, and Diasporic Life in Minaret
• Madhuar Patil
  Caste, Shame, and Narrative Voice in Marathi Literature: Dalit Autobiography, Space, and Political Affect
• Mohammed Tahir
  Bureaucracy as an Uncanny Mirror: Class Shame and the Politics of Doubling in Dostoevsky’s The Double (1846)

14:30–15:00 Coffee Break

15:00–17:00 (Section 4)

Section leader: Ivana Zajc

Participants

• Helen Penet
  The Dismantling of Menstrual Shame in Recent Irish Young Adult Novels
• Fatma Karaaslan Özgü
  The Horror of Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child: The Shame of Mothering a Blemished Child
• Aleksandra Vukelić
  “I Am the Mother Now”: Abjection, Body Shame, and Maternal Figures in Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God and The Fire-Dwellers
• Soumaya Hachani
  Embodied Shame and Resistance in Contemporary Feminist War Poetry

Thursday, June 18, 2026 (Zoom sessions)

9:00–10:30 (Section 1)

Section leader: Lucija Mandić

Participants

• Elma Halilović
  The Motif of Shame in the Novels of Enes Halilović
• Jelena Pavlović Jovanović & Jelena Andjelković
  Forms Of Shame In Contemporary Serbian Literature – the Case of Despina from the Novel First Snow by Tajana Poterjahin
• Pavel Ocepek
  “Your First Time Is Never Forgotten!”: An Analysis of Sexuality and Shame in Slavko Grum’s Play Dogodek v mestu Gogi (An Event in the Town of Goga)

10:30–11:00 Coffee Break

11:00–13:00 (Section 2)

Section leader: 

Participants

• Enikő Rumi
  Silenced Female Voices Resonating Across Centuries and Continents
• Harem Omar
  From Silenced Spaces to Resonant Voices: Shame and Liberation in Assia Djebar’s Fantasia
• Kalpi Devrani
  Shapes of Shame in Surreal Literature: Analysing Sabrina Orah Mark's Wild Milk
• Sofia de Melo Araújo
  Shame, Power, and Resistance in Iris Murdoch’s The Flight from the Enchanter

13:00–13:30 Lunch

13:30–15:00 (Section 3)

Section leader:

Participants

• Hind El Baz
  Shame in Honoré de Balzac's Père Goriot: Psychological and Social Mechanisms
• Maša Petrovič
  Shame as a Dominant Affective Paradigm in the Emotional Landscape of Ivo Andrić’s Prose
• Sergio Novo
  Shame of Writing: The Case of Georges Bataille 

15:00–15:30 Coffee Break

15:30–17:00 (Section 4)

Section leader: Darko Ilin

Participants

• Mark Anthony Cayanan
  On Kahihiyan: “Understood Shame” in Philippine Anglophone Poetry
• Florian Lützelberger
  Becoming ‘Another’: Class Shame, Queer Shame, and the Politics of Transformation in Édouard Louis
• Selma Skenderović
  Shame as a Boundary Mechanism of Belonging: Queer Identity Between Family, Nation, and Migration
  
  

Keynote Lecture

• Mónica Bolufer Peruga (European University Institute)

Gendered Narratives of National Pride and Shame: the Transnational and Transatlantic Travels of an Eighteenth-century Novel

This lecture will discuss the importance of literary sources in cultural and political history, as well as the transformative effects of translation and book circulation. It will do so by delving into the political and gender implications of a philosophical and sentimental novel in the context of eighteenth-century nation-building and imperial rivalries. The famous Lettres d’une péruvienne (1747) by the French female writer Françoise de Graffigny had many versions, adaptations, and sequels across Europe. Among these, the Spanish one by a female translator, María Rosario Romero (1792), and the alleged (probably fictitious) previous one by yet another woman in colonial Peru stand out for their particular significance for the Black Legend about Spain and its empire and the political and social upheavals and Atlantic revolutions of the late eighteenth century.

I will use this case study to explore three interconnected themes: translation as a creative and often collaborative process of rewriting, adaptation, and recirculation; its significance for women as a means to make intellectual interventions in the republic of letters, and the role of literature in processes of international competition for cultural and political supremacy involving shaming rivals and constructing national pride.

About Shame in Literature

Shame is a deeply social and moral emotion, arising when individuals perceive themselves as failing to meet the expectations of others or internalized societal norms. It manifests through physiological responses, behaviors, and metaphoric expressions, often operating below the threshold of explicit language. In literature, shame functions both as a thematic and structural force, shaping characters, plots, and the emotional charge of texts.

The international conference "Shapes of Shame in Literature" will take place in Nova Gorica, Slovenia, on 15–18 June 2026. The event is part of the research project Shapes of Shame in Slovene Literature (J6-60113), funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS). The project is focused on the poetics and politics of shame in literature, through close, computational and other readings.

We welcome contributions exploring how shame operates in literary texts – whether through motifs of humiliation, the representation of marginalized identities, intersections with class, gender, ethnicity, disability, queerness, or bodily otherness, or via literary techniques such as narrative voice, metaphor, and embodiment.

We will explore case studies, theoretical reflections, and interdisciplinary approaches that consider shame not only as an emotional experience but also as a cultural, political, and aesthetic phenomenon. Please join us in rethinking how literature reveals, encodes, or resists the many faces of shame.

This event will explore the politics and poetics of shame through an intersectional lens, focusing on how shame is experienced and represented in literature across dimensions such as ethnicity, class, disability, gender, and queerness. It will examine how marginalized identities are shaped by interlocking forms of discrimination and how shame functions both as a personal emotion and a social mechanism. Special attention will be given to under-researched areas in literature, such as class shame, queer shame, and the portrayal of disability. The conference aims to foster interdisciplinary discussion and generate new interpretations of literary works through the lens of affect theory and intersectionality.

The conference will feature both in-person and Zoom sessions. Each participant will have 20 minutes for their presentation, followed by a discussion. There is no participation fee.

Several key prompts for the papers:

• How do literary authors from the 19th to the 21st Century employ textual strategies to articulate and depict shaming and shame?
• What insights can be gained through a combination of computational analysis of a larger literary corpus and in-depth examination of selected case studies?
• Who is the subject and object of shame in literature, and how is this emotion mediated, conveyed, and experienced in the literary works?
• How does the narration permit certain characters to speak and express shame while silencing others, thus contributing to their feelings of shame?
• How does shame manifest and influence the regulation of emotions and actions within the depicted elements of literary works, including characters and the overall narrative?
• Each discourse has a specific political level. How does this function through literary means? In what way do literary representations in literature connect with discourses?
• How is the isolating and liberating potential of shame represented in literary works?
• How can the concept of shame in literature and in literary authorship be examined through a gendered perspective?
• How is shame portrayed within individual case studies of different literary genres (for example crime fiction)?
• How do romance novels explore the theme of adultery and its connection to shame?
• In what ways do folk tales depict the shaming of children and poor people, and how is shame expressed in this context?
• How are shame and nuanced expressions of this emotion represented in autofiction?
• Which real and imaginary spaces in the selected literary works are associated with the emotion of shame?
• How do authors express the marked nature of specific spaces with shame through literary devices (descriptions, direct speech, internal monologue)?
• How does narrative perspective impact the representations of shame about space (for example, through the comparison between third-person and first-person narrators)?
• How did the shaming of literary authors take place in history? Which media and which mechanisms were used for this?
• What were the underlying reasons for shaming the authors? Were these reasons conveyed implicitly or explicitly?
• How is shame interconnected with instances of literary creators deviating from the societal and stylistic norms of their era?
• How are shame and instances of shaming within selected case studies related to the rejection of canonization for specific authors?