Surveillance and Shame in Dave Eggers’s The Circle

Betiel Wasihun

doi:10.22029/oc.2018.1150

Betiel Wasihun TU Berlin

DOI: https://doi.org/10.22029/oc.2018.1150

Keywords: Dave Eggers, privacy, shame, surveillance, The Circle, transparency

Abstract

Shame is a complex and controversial emotion, but there are commonly accepted notions of shame which revolve around questions regarding exposure, appearance and visibility. As Jonathan Finn notes, through digitalization and camera surveillance in public spaces, surveillance has become a “way of seeing, a way of being” (2012). Thus, the question of visibility — or invisibility — is as inherent to the concept of surveillance as it is to that of shame. Social media users tend to contribute to disempowering exhibition by sharing their personal information in the online public domain. In other words: today’s “Funopticon” (Lewis 2017) is all about self-exposure. Shame, on the other hand, is generally perceived as an affect that emerges from fear of exposure. But how sustainable is this notion of shame in light of contemporary digital ‘surveillance culture’ (Lyon 2017)? I will examine shame against the backdrop of digital surveillance in Dave Eggers’s The Circle (2013), while also drawing comparisons to our contemporary condition in the culture of surveillance.

Author Biography

Betiel Wasihun, TU Berlin

Betiel Wasihun has recently joined the Institute of Philosophy, Literary Studies, History of Science and Technology after being awarded an IPODI-Marie Curie Fellowship. Before coming to the TU Berlin, she was a Montgomery-DAAD Fellow and Lecturer in Modern German Literature at the University of Oxford. She holds an M.A. (2005) and PhD (2009) in German Studies from the University of Heidelberg and was also a Research and Teaching Fellow at the German Department of Yale University during her graduate studies (2006–2008). In 2010 she published a monograph on the phenomenon of competition in selected texts by Kafka, R. Walser, and Beckett, with a primary focus on Kafka (Heidelberg: Winter). In 2013 she co-edited the volume Playing False: Representations of Betrayal (Oxford: Lang). Her current project examines how technologies and theories of surveillance inform the narrative situations in contemporary literature.