Odysseys of Recognition

Performing Intersubjectivity in Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Kleist

Ellwood Wiggins

2019
342 pages
$37.95
ISBN 9781684480371
New Studies in the Age of Goethe

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.

Order here

Reviews

"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

"The discoveries that Wiggins invites his readers to share over the impressively wide-ranging trajectory of his monograph are far too numerous to retrace within the limits of a brief review.... [Odysseys of Recognition] 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.
- German Quarterly Book Reviews, Winter 2020

"The alertly nuanced readings develop layer on layer of meaning with the kind of sophistication that is simultaneously authoritative and open-minded, innovative and thoroughly grounded in scholarly erudition. Wiggins draws from an extensive range of sources to propose fresh interpretations and advance novel alterations of meaning for the texts under study."
- Modern Language Quarterly, June 2020

"By defining recognition as performance in this robust sense, Wiggins's monograph breaks new ground in our understanding of one of Aristotle's notoriously slippery concepts.... 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, Volume 27, 2020

"Ellwood Wiggins has produced a learned and thoughtful study of Aristotelian anagnorisis and its applicability to literary texts from Homer to Kleist.... Wiggins's analysis of the political and ethical dimensions of anagnorisis can be extended to encompass contemporary developments such as online avatars and virtual reality."
- German Studies Review, Volume 43, Number 3, October 2020

About the author:

Ellwood Wiggins is an assistant professor of German at the University of Washington.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $150.00, 978-1-6844-8038-8; EPUB: $37.95, 978-1-6844-8039-5