A Meditation on Humiliation

This beautifully and eloquently written piece by Elizabeth Bachner explores the ways in which we feel and conceptualize the human emotion of humiliation.

What is humiliation exactly, and how does it play such a crucial role in literature and in our lives? How do we purge of such an emotion through the act of writing or reading? Bachner reflects on “the humiliated, sexed body in a poem, or in life” while connecting her own thoughts and sentiments with other instances of this particularly curious human emotion throughout the world of literature.

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Claire Rush studies Geography and French at UC Berkeley. She lives in one of the largest co-ops in North America and has been an active member in the Berkeley Student Cooperative for the last two years. Apart from yoga and biking and the occasional hike, her main activities include chilling, hanging around, trying to teach herself how to cook, daydreaming about Burning Man, and watching seasons of old TV shows on the internet.

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The Rumpus publishes original fiction, poetry, literary humor writing, comics, essays, book reviews, and interviews with authors and artists of all kinds. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers our readers may already know and love. We want to bring new perspectives into the conversation that will make us all look deeper.

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