Description
Book SynopsisLiterary recognition is a technical term for a climactic plot device.
Odysseys of Recognition claims that interpersonal recognition is constituted by performance, and brings performance theory into dialogue with poetics, politics, and philosophy. By observing Odysseus figures from Homer to Kleist, Ellwood Wiggins offers an alternative to conventional intellectual histories that situate the invention of the interior self in modernity. Through strategic readings of Aristotle, this elegantly written, innovative study recovers an understanding of interpersonal recognition that has become strange and counterintuitive. Penelope in Homer’s
Odyssey offers a model for agency in ethical knowledge that has a lot to teach us today. Early modern and eighteenth-century characters, meanwhile, discover themselves not deep within an impenetrable self, but in the interpersonal space between people in the world. Recognition, Wiggins contends, is the moment in which epistemology and ethics coincide: in which what we know becomes manifest in what we do.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Trade Review"This is an intelligent, serious, patient, and innovative work. It is also beautifully written: nimble, unaffected, crystal-clear, and often entertaining." -- Nicholas Rennie * Rutgers University *
"Poised between literary studies, philosophy, and political theory, the elegant
Odysseys of Recognition will be of interest to a broad range of scholars. Scholars of the
Goethezeit will find much to contemplate, as will classicists and philosophers." * Goethe Yearbook *
"To take Wiggins at his word, the varied recognitions that result from his painstaking analyses are both decisively conclusive and tantalizingly openended. The point is to learn to be amenable to change in all its potentiality— that is, without settling for a substantial conclusion that would preclude further modification. In this way Wiggins’s assiduous brand of literary criticism acquires ethical urgency. As he beautifully formulates it, given the temporal nature of intersubjective, performative relations, any conclusion “is never fully commensurate with or explanatory of the living complexity of another human." * Modern Language Quarterly *
"Wiggins’s monograph solicits and breaks ground for further readings in and beyond the texts he addresses. For whether it is a question of the most often cited texts of antiquity, their reinventions in the renaissance, or their adaptations in Weimar Classicism, and romanticism, Wiggins’s interventions will have altered what it means to come to know them." * The German Quarterly *
"Ellwood Wiggins has produced a learned and thoughtful study of Aristotelian anagnorisis and its applicability to literary texts from Homer to Kleist." * German Studies Review *
"This is an intelligent, serious, patient, and innovative work. It is also beautifully written: nimble, unaffected, crystal-clear, and often entertaining." -- Nicholas Rennie * Rutgers University *
"Poised between literary studies, philosophy, and political theory, the elegant
Odysseys of Recognition will be of interest to a broad range of scholars. Scholars of the
Goethezeit will find much to contemplate, as will classicists and philosophers." * Goethe Yearbook *
"To take Wiggins at his word, the varied recognitions that result from his painstaking analyses are both decisively conclusive and tantalizingly openended. The point is to learn to be amenable to change in all its potentiality— that is, without settling for a substantial conclusion that would preclude further modification. In this way Wiggins’s assiduous brand of literary criticism acquires ethical urgency. As he beautifully formulates it, given the temporal nature of intersubjective, performative relations, any conclusion “is never fully commensurate with or explanatory of the living complexity of another human." * Modern Language Quarterly *
"Wiggins’s monograph solicits and breaks ground for further readings in and beyond the texts he addresses. For whether it is a question of the most often cited texts of antiquity, their reinventions in the renaissance, or their adaptations in Weimar Classicism, and romanticism, Wiggins’s interventions will have altered what it means to come to know them." * The German Quarterly *
"Ellwood Wiggins has produced a learned and thoughtful study of Aristotelian anagnorisis and its applicability to literary texts from Homer to Kleist." * German Studies Review *
Table of Contents Overview of Contents ... vii
Illustrations ... viii
Abbreviations ... ix
A Note on Translations and Orthography ... xi
Introduction: Performing Recognition ... 1
Interiority Illusion
Instantaneousness Illusion
Recognition as Performance
Aims and Scope of Readings
Part I. Marking the Limits of Recognition: Between Aristotle and the
Odyssey ... 31
1 “Just as the name itself signifies”: Under the Sign of Recognition ... 37
Nostalgia and Recognition
Recognitions in Mycenae and Sparta
Nostalgic Recognition and Epic Afterness
Self-signification and the Nostalgia of Semiotics
2 “Recognition is a change”: Performance in Motion ... 84
Rhapsodic Mimesis and Narration
Change in Aristotle’s
Physics and
Poetics Crying for Show in the
Odyssey Recognition in Performance Theory and Moral Philosophy
3 “From ignorance to knowledge”: Penelope’s Poetological Epistemology ... 131
Penelopean Epistemology (Reading Penelope)
Penelopean Poetics (Penelope Reading)
4 “Into friendship or enmity”: An Ethics of Authentic Deception ... 164
5 “For those bound for good or bad fortune”: Casualties of Recognition ... 193
Part II. Outing Interiority: Modern Recognitions ... 211
6 Self-Knowledge Between Plato and Shakespeare:
Alcibiades and
Troilus and Cressida ... 218
Philosophy or Theater?
Mirrored Dramatic Structures
Mirrored Selves
7 Metamorphoses of Recognition: Goethe’s “Fortunate Event” ... 248
“Glückliches Ereignis” as Anagnorisis Scene
Recognizing Action: Visualizing Stories
Recognizing Things: Experiencing Ideas
Recognizing People: Moving Tableaux
8 Epistemologies of Recognition: Goethe’s
Iphigenie auf Tauris and the Spectacle of Catharsis ... 292
Spirals of Intertextual Performance
Intertextual Intersubjectivity
Intertextual Spectacle
The Effects of Tragedy
9 Politics of Recognition: Friends, Enemies, and Goethe’s
Iphigenie ... 324
Between Recognition and Acknowledgement
The Exception of Friendship
The Promise of Politics
10 The Fate of Recognition: Kleist’s
Penthesilea ... 361
The Mirrored Gaze
Plays within Plays
Concluding Reflections: Signifying Silence in Blumenberg and Kafka ... 403
Acknowledgements ... 417
Bibliography ... 421
Index ... 448
About the Author ... 449
