Reading for Recognition

In the past decades the topic of recognition has moved to the center of critical theories and philosophical debates. Can these theories be of use for literary studies? This essay discusses the relation between literature and recognition in five parts: first, a comparison of two different perspectives on recognition that are especially suggestive for possible uses of the concept in literary studies; second, a discussion of the question of identity, since, in current debates, recognition is inextricably linked with questions of identity formation; third, an overview of some of the dominant motifs and patterns in narratives of recognition in order to highlight the amazing centrality of the theme in a wide range of literary texts and literary genres and to regain an awareness of an imaginary core of literature that has often been forgotten in the professionalization of literary studies; fourth, a discussion to what extent recognition can also be understood and described as an effect of the reading experience (and of aesthetic experience more generally); and fifth, a return to the starting question of the relation between literature and recognition, focusing on the issue of reciprocity and on the challenge provided by normative theories of recognition.