Abstract
This article examines the relationship between the form of Canadian poet Anne Carson’s Nox and its content, particularly as they relate to shame and subjectivity. As an elegy, Nox is as much about the person mourned – Carson’s long-estranged brother – as it is about Carson herself. Yet, even as the book hints at real personalities and the kinds of shame they experienced, Nox also lends a dignity to both, enacting therefore the protective measures of shame through both the aesthetics of the book and the narratives it recounts. As a study of shame, therefore, I argue that Nox writes of the self without relying on the construct of the coherent, core self. Nox illustrates the various shames a self can feel but also the way shame can emerge as an aesthetic or poetics independent of the feeling self.
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