1st Edition

Real Recognition What Literary Texts Reveal about Social Validation and the Politics of Identity

By Marie-Elisabeth Lei Pihl Copyright 2023

    Real Recognition investigates the complexities of literary and social recognition with the aim of putting a fresh, cross-disciplinary spin on reader identification and social acknowledgment. Engaging with contemporary Danish and Anglophone works on racialization, disability, and gender, Marie-Elisabeth Lei Pihl argues in favor of a close relation between aesthetic appeals to recognition and the political dimensions of literary texts. Moreover, she proposes a framework bent on experience and relations, as opposed to identity and status, for articulating new fruitful understandings of how literary texts call for aesthetic and social recognition. Based on this, she argues that literary texts can make readers get what social validation is about – and thereby help us redefine a key concept in the social sciences.

    Marie-Elisabeth Lei Pihl earned her PhD in literature and sociology from the University of Southern Denmark in 2020. Currently, she works as a postdoctoral researcher within narrative medicine and literature-based social interventions at the University of Southern Denmark in collaboration with the National Institute of Public Health in Copenhagen.

    Chapter 3 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

    Acknowledgments

    Introduction

    Recognition in Political Theory

    Literary Recognition

    1. Racialization and Recognition

    History as a Crime

    A Poetic Hip-Hop Manifesto

    2. Disability and Recognition

    A New Outlook on Time

    Sociability and Empty Recognition

    3. Gender and Recognition

    Gender, Motherhood and Invisible Labor

    The Power to Narrate

    Conclusion

    Bibliography

    Biography

    Marie-Elisabeth Lei Pihl earned her PhD in literature and sociology from the University of Southern Denmark in 2020. Currently, she works as a postdoctoral researcher within narrative medicine and literature-based social interventions at The University of Southern Denmark in collaboration with The National Institute of Public Health in Copenhagen.

    "This book breaks new intellectual ground in questioning notions of recognition based on either status or identity, in showing how literature can enhance and complicate existing notions of recognition, and in developing new concepts such as ‘empty recognition’ and in challenging existing ideas about the relation between recognition and redistribution. No other scholar, to my knowledge, has developed such a substantial account of the relations between recognition in literature and in the social sciences. It is a major contribution to scholarship that will certainly shape my own future thinking about recognition."

    -Rita Felski, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English, University of Virginia, USA.