THE POETICS OF IRONY AND ANTICIPATORY SHAME IN CONTEMPORARY YOU-NARRATION

This thesis argues that contemporary you-narratives implicate readers in a self-reflexive reading practice that evinces an attachment to the anticipation of shame. I survey a range of paper-hypertexts, memoirs, self-help fiction, novels, and television series characterised by prospection according to the future perfect tense structure to provide an account of you-narration and its formal relationship to shame in contemporary writing. This thesis draws on postclassical narratology and studies of phenomenology to understand the relation between narrative and shame in you-narratives such as Andrew Cowan’s Your Fault, Paul Auster’s Winter Journal, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, Alejandro Zambra’s Multiple Choice, Patrick Flanery’s The Ginger Child, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, Vendela Vida’s The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty, Clarice Lispector’s A Breath of Life, Christine Angot’s Sujet Angot, Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body, and Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown. I begin by examining you-narratives that feature a latent narrating-I situated in the future addressing a you-narratee situated in the present. Using David Herman’s concept of doubly deictic you, I argue that the second-person pronoun’s indeterminate address and reference functions to produce a temporal and ontological schism that formalises the phenomenological structure of shame. While I contend that textual forms constitute a temporal version of metalepsis, I also draw a parallel between Herman’s doubly deictic you and Henri Bergson’s description of double temporalisation to illustrate how a certain you-address might represent the temporalisation of parabasis. I conclude by reflecting on the politics of second-person address in the context of gender and racial difference. By interpellating an individuated reader that reflects the you of political narratives which emerge from the cultural context of late capitalism, you-narratives function within a broader social rhetoric that ironically removes the agency it purports to offer