×

J. Brooks Bouson

Professor Emerita

In my scholarship and teaching, I have focused on twentieth- and twenty-first century women’s literature and modern literature.  I also have a long-standing interest in Heinz Kohut’s psychoanalytic self-psychology and his psychoanalytic investigation of narcissism and empathy.  In my first book The Empathic Reader: A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of the Self, I offered the first application of Kohut to the study of literature and the empathic dynamics of critic/readers’ transactions with literary texts. “In an essential way,” as I stated in my conclusion, “the meaning of a literary work grows out of the empathic event that occurs between the critic/reader and the text. . . . Empathic reading makes us aware of our affective and collusive involvements with literature, of the various negotiated roles we are invited to play as we respond to fictional characters, and of the ways in which we may act out our own self-dramas when we interpret literary works." 

After publishing The Empathic Reader, I turned to the study of women's literature and in 1993 I published a critical study of Margaret Atwood: Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret Atwood.   After completing my work on Atwood, I turned to the study of shame in literature and the trauma narrative. In my 2000 book, Quiet As It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison, I wrote about the highly sensitive issues of racial shame and trauma in the works of Morrison. In my 2005 book, Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the Mother, I wrote about the lasting impact of the trauma of child abuse and maternal shaming on Antiguan-born writer, Jamaica Kincaid.  In my 2009 book, Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writings, I investigated the deeply entrenched body shame that persists in the lives of girls and women in our twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture of appearances. In my 2016 book Shame and the Aging Woman: Confronting and Resisting Ageism in Contemporary Women’s Writings (Chinese translation 2022), I showed how the shaming ideology of sexageism oppresses older women in our culture. 

In addition to my work on shame in literature, I have published three critical collections on Atwood: Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood (2012); Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake (2011); and Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (2009).  I've also published articles discussing Atwood’s engagement with radical environmentalism in her eco-apocalyptic MaddAddam novels: “A ‘Joke-Filled Romp’ through End Times: Radical Environmentalism, Deep Ecology, and Human Extinction in Margaret Atwood’s Eco-apocalyptic MaddAddam trilogy” (2016);  "‘We’re Using up the Earth. It’s Almost Gone’: A Return to the Post-Apocalyptic Future in Margaret Atwood’s The Year the Flood” (2011); “‘It’s Game Over Forever’: Atwood’s Satiric Vision of a Bioengineered Posthuman Future in Oryx and Crake” (2004).  

In recent years, I've become interested in expanding my research on shame by focusing on the emerging research on public shaming, especially digital shaming and cyber-bullying, a favorite tactic of people who have figured out how to shamelessly “weaponize” shame. 

Education

  • PhD, Loyola University Chicago

Research Interests

  • Modern British Literature
  • Psychoanalysis and Literature
  • Emotions and Literature
  • Shame in Literature
  • Trauma and Narrative

Publications/Research Listings

Books:

  • Shame and the Aging Woman: Confronting and Resisting Ageism in Contemporary Women’s Writings. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
  • Chinese translation of Shame and the Aging Woman: Confronting and Resisting Ageism in Contemporary Women’s Writings (羞耻与衰老女性：当代女性文学中年龄歧视的对抗与抵制). Trans. Di Yang. Nanjing, China: Southeast University Press, 2002.
  • "We are Aging in a Culture of Shame."  Italian version: "Invecchiamo in una cultura della vergogna." Interview of J. Brooks Bouson conducted by Stefania Medetti on Shame and the Aging Woman. February 28, 2020. The Age Buster: English  Italiano. https://www.theagebuster.com/blog-page/2020/2/28/we-are-aging-culture-shame
  • Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writings. SUNY Press, 2009.
  • Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the Mother. SUNY Press, 2005.
  • Quiet As It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison. SUNY Press, 2000. 
  • Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret Atwood.  University of Massachusetts Press, 1993.
  • The Empathic Reader: A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of the Self. University of Massachusetts Press, 1989.

Edited Books:

  • Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood. Salem Press, 2012.
  • Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake. Continuum Press, 2011.
  • Critical Insights: Emily Dickinson. Salem Press, 2010.
  • Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Salem Press, 2009.

Articles and Book Chapters:

  • "Sexual Shame, Family Honor, and the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory." Contemporary Literary Criticism: Third World Feminism. Gale-Cengage. Forthcoming, 2025.
  • “Les temps de la fin” (French translation of "End Times in Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy). Trans. Christine Evain (Dir.), Margaret Atwood. Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 2025, pp. 112-116. Forthcoming 2025.
  • "Aging and Old Age." In Contemporary Literature and the Body: A Critical Introduction. Edited by Alice Hall. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. Pgs. 191-214.
  • “Atwood and Environmentalism.” The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. 2nd edition. Ed. Coral Howells. Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2019-2021. Pgs. 76-91.
  • "Jamaica Kincaid." In Twentieth Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context (4 vols.). Ed. Linda De Roche. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, forthcoming 2021.
  • “Mary Mason’s Life Prints: A Memoir of Healing and Discovery.” In Disability Experiences, 2 volumes.  Ed. G. Thomas Couser and Susannah Mintz. Farmington, MI: Macmillan Reference, 2019. Volume 1, 385−388.
  • “Glimpses of a Failed Marriage: Autobiographical Scenes of Shame and Revenge in Jamaica Kincaid’s See Now Then.”  Contemporary Women’s Writing 12:3 (November 2018): 357−374.
  • “Writing Shame and Disgust in Susan Gubar’s Memoir of a Debulked Woman.” Shame and Modern Writing. Ed. Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh. New York and London: Routledge, 2018.  184−97.     
  • “A ‘Joke-Filled Romp’ through End Times: Radical Environmentalism, Deep Ecology, and Human Extinction in Margaret Atwood’s Eco-apocalyptic MaddAddam trilogy.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 51.3 (2016): 341−57.
  • “‘I Like My Own Dirt’: Disinterested Violence and Shamelessness in Toni Morrison’s Sula.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 366. Ed. Lawrence Trudeau. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2015. 260−75. Originally published in Quiet As It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Albany: SUNY Press, 2000.
  • “‘Quiet as It’s Kept’: Shame and Trauma in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.”  Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis, Shame, and Writing.  Ed. Joseph Adamson and Hilary Clark.  Albany: SUNY Press, 1999.  207-236. Reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 363. Ed. Lawrence Trudeau. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2014. 91−106.
  • “I Had Embarked on Something Called Self-invention: Jamaica Kincaid’s Artistic Beginnings in “Antigua Crossings” and At the Bottom of the River.” Short Story Criticism: Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers. Volume 80. Ed. Lawrence Trudeau.  Detroit: Gale-Cengage, 2013.  150−159.
  • “We’re Using up the Earth. It’s Almost Gone”: A Return to the Post-Apocalyptic Future in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature  46.1 (2011): 9-26.  Reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 342. Ed. Jeffrey Hunter. Detroit: Gale, 2013. 137−46.
  • “On Margaret Atwood.” Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2012. 3-24.
  • “Beloved  Exposes the Psychological Traumas Caused by Slavery.” Social Issues in Literature: Slavery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Ed. Dedris Bryfonski. Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2012. 103−117.
  • “The Special Impact of The Handmaid’s Tale on Female Readers.” Women’s Issues in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Ed. David Nelson. Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2012. 87−97.
  • “Negotiating with Margaret Atwood.”  Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake.  London: Continuum Press, 2011. 1-17.
  • “On Emily Dickinson.” Critical Insights: Emily Dickinson. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2010. 3−11.
  • “On Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2009. 3-9.
  • “Quiet As It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison” (on Song of Solomon). Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon: Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009. 57-86.
  • “The Politics of Empathy and Self in Christa Wolf’s The Quest for Christa T. / Die Politik der Empathie und des Selbst in Christa Wolfs Nachdenken uber Christa T. Special edition of the European Self Psychology Journal—Selbstpsychologie: Europäische Zeitschrift für Psychoanalytische Therapie und Forschung: Selobstpsychologie und die Künste 35 (2009): 53-70.
  • “‘It’s Game Over Forever’: Atwood’s Satiric Vision of a Bioengineered Posthuman Future in Oryx and Crake.”  Margaret Atwood: Bloom’s Modern Critical Views.  Ed. Harold Bloom.  New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009. 93-110. Originally published in Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39.3 (2004): 139-156.
  • “Insect Transformation as a Narcissistic Metaphor in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.” Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.  Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations. Ed. Harold Bloom.  New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009.  35-46.
  • “Like Him and His Own Father before Him, I Have a Line Drawn through Me”: Imagining the Life of the Absent Father in Mr. Potter.”  Jamaica Kincaid: Modern Critical Views.  Ed. Harold Bloom.   New York: Infobase, 2008. 159-74.
  • “Uncovering ‘the Beloved’ in the Warring and Lawless Women in Toni Morrison’s Love.” Midwest Quarterly 49. 4 (Summer 2008): 358-373.
  • “‘A Commemoration of Wounds, Endured and Resented’: Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin as Feminist Memoir.”  Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 44.3 (Spring 2003): 251-69. Reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 246. Ed. Jeffrey Hunter. Detroit: Gale, 2008. 116−127.
  • “‘Teaching English Isn’t the Clean Work It Used to Be’: Satirizing the Plight of Token Professionals in Richard Russo’s Straight Man.”  Academic Novels as Satire: Critical Studies of an Emerging Genre.   Ed. Kimberly Rae Connor and Mark Bosco, S. J.  Lewiston: Mellen Press, 2007. 111-130.
  • “True Confessions: Uncovering the Hidden Culture of Shame in English Studies.” JAC 25. 4 (2006): 625-50.
  • “‘Speaking the Unspeakable’: Shame, Trauma and Morrison’s Fiction.” Toni Morrison: Bloom’s Modern Critical Views.  Ed. Harold Bloom.  Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2005.  121-148.
  • “‘Sethe’s ‘Best Thing.’” Toni Morrison’s Beloved.   Ed. Harold Bloom.  Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004.  91-101.
  • “‘You Nothing But Trash’: White Trash Shame in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina.” Southern Literary Journal  34. 1 (Fall 2001): 101-23.
  • “The Misogyny of Patriarchal Culture in The Handmaid’s Tale.” The Handmaid’s Tale: Modern Critical Interpretations.  Ed. Harold Bloom.  Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001.  41-62.
  • “The Edible Woman’s Refusal to Consent to Femininity.”  Margaret Atwood: Modern Critical Views.  Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2000.  71-91.
  • “Poetry and the Unsayable: Edwin Muir’s Conception of the Powers and Limitations of Poetic Speech.” Studies in Scottish Literature 17 (1983): 23-38. Reprinted in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Vol. 87. Ed. Jennifer Blaise. Detroit: Gale, 2000. 275−81.
  • “The Repressed Grandiosity of Gregor Samsa: A Kohutian Reading of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.”  Narcissism and the Text: Studies in Literature and the Psychology of the Self.   Ed.  Lynne Layton and Barbara Schapiro.  New York University Press, 1986.  192-212. Reprinted in Short Story Criticism. Vol. 35. Ed. Anna Sheets-Nesbit. Detroit: Gale, 2000.  251−59.
  • “Narcissistic Vulnerability and Rage in Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground.” Short Story Criticism.  Vol. 33. Ed. Anna Sheets-Nesbit. Detroit: Gale, 1999. 221-228. Originally published in The Empathic Reader: A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of the Self.  Amherst, Mass: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989.
  • “Comic Storytelling as Escape and Narcissistic Self-Expression in Atwood’s Lady Oracle.”  DISCovering Authors 3.0 (on-line subscription database).  Detroit: Gale Group, 2000.  DISCovering Authors Modules (CD-ROM).  Detroit: Gale, 1996.  Contemporary Literary Criticism.  Vol. 84.  Ed. James Draper.  Detroit: Gale, 1995.  72-77.
  • “A Feminist/Psychoanalytic Approach in a Women’s College.”  Approaches to Teaching Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.  Ed.  Sharon Wilson, Thomas Friedman, and Shannon Hengen.  New York: Modern Language Association, 1996.  122-27. 
  • “‘Slipping Sideways into the Dreams of Women’: The Female Dream Work of Power Feminism in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.”  LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory  6 (1995): 149-166.
  • “The Politics of Empathy and Self in Christa Wolf’s The Quest for Christa T.”  Mimetic Desire: Essays on Narcissism in German Literature from Romanticism to Post Modernism.   Ed.  Jeffrey Adams and Eric Williams.  Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995.  187-204.
  • “Empathy and Self-Validation in Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day.”  The Critical Response to Saul Bellow.  Ed. Gerhard Bach.  Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1995.  83-99. 
  • “The Anxiety of Being Influenced: Reading and Responding to Character in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman.”  Style 24 (Summer 1990): 228-41. 
  • “The Narcissistic Drama and Reader/Text Transaction in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.”  Critical Essays on Franz Kafka.  Ed. Ruth V. Gross.  Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990.  191-205. 
  • “The ‘Hidden Agenda’ of Winston Smith: Pathological Narcissism and 1984.”  University of Hartford Studies in Literature 18 (1986): 8-20.
  • “The Narcissistic Self-Drama of Wilhelm Adler: A Kohutian Reading of Bellow’s Seize the Day.”  Saul Bellow Journal 5 (Spring-Summer 1986): 3-14.
  • “A Poet ‘Taught by Dreams and Fantasies’: Edwin Muir’s Dual Vision of Man.”  The Scope of the Fantastic.  Ed. Robert A. Collins and Howard D. Pearce.  Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985.  115-125.
  • “The Survival of the Human Spirit in an Age of Crisis: Edwin Muir’s Vision of Modern History.”  Cithara 19 (1979): 26-39.
  • “Emily Dickinson and the Riddle of Containment.”  Emily Dickinson Bulletin (June 1977): 33-49.
  • “A Reading of Ted Hughes’s Crow.”  Concerning Poetry (Fall 1974): 21-32.

Book Reviews and Encyclopedia Entries:

  •  Daryl Cumber Dance. In Search of Annie Drew: Jamaica Kincaid’s Mother and Muse. Review. African American Review 51.1 (Spring 2018): 68−71.
  • Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber. Race, Trauma, and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Review. Modern Fiction Studies 58.1 (Spring 2012): 155-58.
  • Jennifer L. Griffiths.  Traumatic Possessions: The Body and Memory in African American Women’s Writing and Performance.  Review. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 29.2 (Fall 2010): 496-98.
  • “Jamaica Kincaid.”  A Feminist Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Ed. Elizabeth Beaulieu.  Westport, Conn: Greenwood Publishing, 2006.Vol. 2: 517-23.
  • “Kincaid’s Annie John.” A Feminist Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Ed. Elizabeth Beaulieu.  Westport, Conn: Greenwood Publishing, 2006. Vol. 1: 18-20.
  • “Kincaid’s Lucy.” A Feminist Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Ed. Elizabeth Beaulieu.  Westport, Conn: Greenwood Publishing, 2006. Vol. 2: 584-85.
  • “Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother.” A Feminist Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Ed. Elizabeth Beaulieu.  Westport, Conn: Greenwood Publishing, 2006  Vol. 1: 30-32.
  • “Jamaica Kincaid.”  Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiography.  Ed. Jo Malin and Victoria Boynton.  Westport, Conn: Greenwood Publishing, 2005.
  • Jean Wyatt. Risking Difference: Identification, Race, and Community in Contemporary Fiction and Feminism.   Albany: SUNY Press, 2004.  Review. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature  24. 1 (Spring 2005): 173-77.
  • “Psychoanalytic Approaches” to Toni Morrison. A Toni Morrison Encyclopedia.  Ed. Elizabeth Beaulieu.  Westport Conn: Greenwood Press, 2003.
  • “Shame” and Toni Morrison. A Toni Morrison Encyclopedia.  Ed. Elizabeth Beaulieu.  Westport Conn: Greenwood Press, 2003.
  • “Trauma” and Toni Morrison. A Toni Morrison Encyclopedia.  Ed. Elizabeth Beaulieu.  Westport Conn: Greenwood Press, 2003.
  • Mary Grimley Mason.  Life Prints: A Memoir of Healing and Discovery.   New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 2001.  Review essay.  Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 24.4 (Fall 2001): 873-877.
  •  “Shannon Hengen’s Margaret Atwood’s Power: Mirrors, Reflections, and Images in Selected Fiction and Poetry” (Toronto: Second Story, 1993).   Review.  Arachne 1.2 (1994): 261-63.