To Grasp the Minds of Men: Performing Recognition [electronic resource].

9781267170453

1 online resource (302 p.)

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This dissertation explores the problem of 'recognition,' from its technical use as a term in the poetics of drama, to the larger question of how people come to know one another and themselves. Much of the resulting theoretical work is encapsulated in the title, inspired by the proem of the Odyssey, which singles out in song Odysseus' knowledge of other people's minds. In contrast to oida, 'know by reflection,' the poem's verb gignosko means to 'know by perception,' and perfectly expresses the sensory, interactive mode of knowing that goes on between people. The kind of knowledge whereby Odysseus grasps the minds of men takes place in the world, not within the confines of his brain. Odysseus' penchant for engineering favorable anagnorisis scenes shows how both famous elements of his character---his cunning and his dash: knowledge and action---are necessary parts of recognition, which is only limned in performance. Recognition is the moment in which epistemology and ethics coincide: in which what we know becomes manifest in what we do. The dissertation consists of five interrogations of the performative aspects of different 'scenes' of recognition: homecoming (Homer's Odyssey); conversion (Shakespeare's and Wilkins' Pericles ); epistemology between drama, ethics, and science (Goethe's Iphigenie and 'Gluckliches Ereignis'); the trope of minoring self in others (Plato, Shakespeare, and Buchner); love and war (Kleist's Penthesilea). This at first surprising theoretical move---turning an epistemological category into a performative one---simultaneously confirms and challenges the Aristotelian definition of anagnorisis: it turns out that spectacle, the element of drama seemingly scorned in the Poetics, is in fact implicated at the very center of story, knowledge, and action.

Books / Online / Dissertations & Theses

English

October 03, 2012

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2011.