Abstract
This chapter is an inquiry into the ethical possibilities of shame in Munro’s story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” It contends that shame, even when unacknowledged, plays an instrumental role in the stimulation of empathy, the emotion that allows for the forging of bonds and knowledge between self and Other, not only at the level of the characters’ interaction, but also between the reader and the text-as-other. Hence, two central questions energizing this analysis are: Can the surfacing of shame to consciousness turn it from a negative affect into a potential agent for the positive transformation of an ethical self? Does Munro’s exploration of shame shed light on the limits of comprehending alterity and the Other-within-the-self, as well as on the ethics of fiction?
Research for this chapter has taken place within the framework of the research project Narratives of Resilience: Intersectional Perspectives about Literature and Other Contemporary Cultural Representations (FFI2015-63895-C2-2-R, MINECO/FEDER), graciously funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.
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Fraile-Marcos, A.M. (2018). Embodied Shame and the Resilient Ethics of Representation in Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”. In: DeFalco, A., York, L. (eds) Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro. Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90644-7_4
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