Odysseys of Recognition: Performing Intersubjectivity in Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Kleist

Erscheinungsjahr 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68448-037-1
Verlag: Bucknell University Press

Buch, Englisch, 298 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 226 mm, Gewicht: 522 g

Reihe: New Studies in the Age of Goet

Literary 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wiggins, Ellwood

Über Autor(innen)

Ellwood Wiggins is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Washington. He has published on Aristotle, Mendelssohn, Lessing, Adam Smith, Goethe, Kleist, Stoppard, Heiner Müller, and K?lid?sa. His translation of Rüdiger Campe’s The Game of Probability: Literature and Calculation between Pascal and Kleist, appeared with Stanford University Press (2013).