First published in New Literary History 44.1 (2013): 45-67. The essay has been slightly revised for this volume. 1 See, for example, Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition; ” Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? ; Honneth and Margalit, “Recognition.” Even where recognition is seen as an identitarian imposition, recognition remains central as an analytical concept for explaining modern societies and their forms of governance. An excellent analysis of the different positions in the debate is provided by Bedorf, Verkennende Anerkennung. Bedorf distinguishes between intercultural theories of recognition (Taylor), intersubjective theories (Honneth), and theories of recognition as subjection or identitarian imposition (Butler). Fraser has been an important contributor to these debates, but in her focus on a “dual perspective” that includes both recognition and distribution, she has not offered a theory of recognition. 2 Honneth has referred to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man on several occasions, albeit briefly, as an illustration of the damaging consequences of a lack of recognition. See, Reading for Recognition Winfried Fluck In the past decades the topic of recognition has moved to the center of critical theories and philosophical debates. 1 Can these theories be of use for literary studies? Can they be applied to the interpretation of literary texts? It is notable that current theories of recognition have little to say about the relation between literature and recognition. One reason may be that these theories conceptualize recognition as an intersubjective relation; in order to gain recognition, I need another person who does the recognizing. But in reading, we do not encounter a living person who responds; many descriptions of the act of reading have described the pleasures of being completely absorbed in a book and forgetting about the rest of the world. In this one-directional account of the reading process, recognition cannot result from social interaction and thus seems to lack a reciprocal dimension. And yet, there are obvious relations between literature and recognition. As a matter of fact, the search for recognition is one of the central themes of literature. A majority of literary texts draw their (often powerful) impact from narratives either of successful recognition or painful misrecognition. 2 Are these literary versions of a search for recognition so widespread because reading allows the reader to replace for example, Honneth and Margalit, “Recognition,” (111), and Honneth, “Unsichtbar‐ keit.” genuine reciprocity with wish-fulfilling fantasies and easy self-confirmations? This would confirm a critique of recognition as an identitarian imposition. Or can the reading process be reconceptualized in terms of a reciprocal encounter? Discussions of the relation between recognition and literature would in this case not be restricted to the plot level of the text (although, as the organizing theme of a narrative, this level cannot be disregarded). They could describe recognition also as an effect of the reading process. Or, to put the question differently: can literature merely describe acts of recognition, or can it also provide recognition that goes beyond the level of representation and does not depend on identification? In the following essay, I will discuss these questions in five parts: first, a comparison of two different perspectives on recognition that, I think, are especially suggestive for possible uses of the concept in literary studies; second, a brief 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 achieve two things: highlighting the amazing centrality of the theme in a wide range of literary texts and genres and regaining an awareness of an imaginary core of fictional texts that has often been forgotten or ignored in the professionalization of literary studies; fourth, a discussion of the extent to which 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 my 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. I. Let me start with a necessarily brief discussion of two approaches that open up different perspectives on possible uses of the concept of recognition for an analysis of modern society and culture. Charles Taylor’s “The Politics of Recognition” can provide a starting point here. Taylor’s point of departure is convincing and articulates a common consensus on the issue: misrecognition, either by discrimination or institutional exclusion, can be seen as a supreme form of social injustice that violates the democratic promise of equality. Society and the state therefore have a moral duty to eliminate forms of institutional 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 294 Winfried Fluck 3 Taylor’s argument poses several problems and has been subject to criticism from various positions. From a liberal perspective, Anthony Appiah objects to his monological view of identity. Asking “to be treated with equal dignity despite being Black (…) will require a concession that being Black counts naturally or to some degree against one’s dignity. And so one will end up asking to be respected as a Black” (149). From a feminist, social-movement perspective, Nicholson aims to show “how certain understandings of identity and recognition have emerged in the post-1960’s feminist and African American movements which take both of these concepts in directions beyond those which Taylor discusses. There have emerged demands within both of these struggles which extend the request that the distinguishing traits of both groups be acknowledged towards the request that the social practices through which the very activity of recognition takes place be changed” (2). Finally, from a perspective inspired by the recognition turn in critical theory (“anerkennungstheoretische Wende”), Bedorf argues: “For an equal recognition of different collective identities, a normative frame is needed, that cannot be provided by a politics of difference” (44, m.t.). exclusion and to create conditions that permit an equal recognition of all members of society. In the context of this argument, culture is an important category for Taylor and his politics of recognition: where the culture of social or ethnic groups is not sufficiently recognized or where it is considered inferior, this must have damaging effects on the identities of the members of this group. As W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon and others have argued, the members of such groups cannot but internalize a sense of their own inferiority as self-image. Recognition is thus a normative term for Taylor. Society has to make sure that full equal recognition is provided, and it therefore has to institutionalize forms of recognition that go beyond the liberal guarantee of individual rights. However, in this argument, identity seems to be something that is already in place through membership in a group. Recognition then means to have one’s difference acknowledged and respected - which implies not only that the individual is defined by group affiliation but also that group affiliation is the crucial determinant of identity. Full equal recognition of one’s own cultural difference appears to constitute a full identity. 3 Another author can help to take the idea of recognition in a different direction, although he himself never used the term. I am referring to Alexis de Tocqueville, who already in the famous first sentence of his Democracy in America - “No novelty in the United States struck me more vividly during my stay there than the equality of conditions” (9) - made the elimination of a society of rank the key for understanding American society and culture. Societies of rank are based on a-priori systems of recognition, and for Tocqueville, it is the abolition of these institutionalized a-priori systems that shapes democracy in America decisively. In rank societies, everybody belongs to a particular social class or group and knows where he or she stands in the social hierarchy. In 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 Reading for Recognition 295 4 This does not mean, of course, that social power relations disappear but that they take on new, more flexible and less visible forms described by several theorists of modernity. contrast, in a democracy nobody can claim to be better than others because of prerogatives of birth or rank. 4 The promise of equality puts the struggle for recognition on new grounds. This is one of the reasons why it could become a central ideological inspiration for modern political revolutions. As long as institutionalized social barriers are still in place, the individual may strive as hard as possible to gain equal recognition but will not succeed. European bourgeois culture is filled with bitter complaints about the visible or unseen social barriers that prevent individuals from being fully recognized in their worth as human beings. Where individuals are successful in crossing the barrier, on the other hand, these texts suggest a loss of moral integrity, resulting in harsh attacks on the immorality or corruption of a social and political system that makes recognition dependent on self-betrayal. Thus, equal recognition could become the battle cry of the bourgeois revolution. What else is the American Declaration of Independence (and the following American Revolution) than an enraged protest against the stubborn resistance of the English crown to recognizing the colonials as equals? However, for Tocqueville the successful American Revolution by no means provides a happy ending to the struggle for recognition, because liberation comes at a price. Where a-priori systems of recognition lose their validity, the new problem emerges of how to stand out from all the others who are equally equal: “They have swept away the privileges of some of their fellow creatures which stood in their way, but they have opened the door to universal competition: the barrier has changed its shape rather than its position. When men are nearly alike, and all follow the same track, it is very difficult for any one individual to walk quick and cleave a way through the dense throng which surrounds and presses them” (537). Since rank is no longer officially accepted as a measure of personal worth, individuals are forced to take it upon themselves to demonstrate their worth to others. This must be especially true in a society of immigrants characterized by great cultural diversity and developing under conditions of great mobility, because this mobility will increase the frequency of encounters with strangers and thereby creates a need on the side of the individual to develop commonly understandable forms of self-presentation. And this challenge is further enhanced, because individuals can never be sure whether they are actually looking for recognition in the best possible place, since the sources and sites of recognition have multiplied, reflecting the functional differentiation of different spheres of action in a modern society. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 296 Winfried Fluck 5 Slowinska has provided an excellent description of the various forms that this new emphasis on performance has taken in American culture. See her essay “Consuming Illusion, Illusions of Consumability.” 6 In the introduction to Multiculturalism, Gutmann provides an apt summary: “In the ancien régime, when a minority could count on being honored (as ‘Ladies’ and ‘Lords’) and the majority could not realistically aspire to public recognition, the demand for recognition was unnecessary for the few and futile for the many. Only with the collapse of stable social hierarchies does the demand for public recognition become commonplace, along with the idea of the dignity of all individuals. Everyone is an equal - a Mr., Mrs., or Ms. - and we all expect to be recognized as such” (6). Two consequences are especially noteworthy in this context. For one, the need for self-fashioning can provide, as Tocqueville himself pointed out, an explanation for the growing role of performance in modern societies and, espe‐ cially, American society, leading to ever growing demands for self-expression. 5 And there is a second important consequence: when class is no longer a stable marker of worth within the status order (which is different from saying that it no longer exists), other markers of distinction such as race and gender grow in importance. Although Tocqueville tries to solve the explanatory challenge of the role of race in American democracy by relegating it to an appendix, he nevertheless provides a theoretical framework that can explain the central role race and racialization play in American society. However, he explains this central role differently: not by racism or by interpellation through the nationstate, but by a need for distinction that, ironically enough, is created by an egalitarian ideology, or, more precisely, by a post-rank society developing new ways of status distinction. Interestingly, Taylor’s politics of recognition takes its starting point from the same observation as Tocqueville. 6 But despite this common point of departure, Taylor then goes in a different direction that helps to mark the difference to Tocqueville. For Taylor, the struggle for recognition is necessary to reestablish a social balance, for Tocqueville it is one of the main sources for ever new imbal‐ ances, because the claim of equality and the search for distinction constantly get into each other’s way. In Taylor’s straightforward “respect constitutes identity” argument, recognition is an important step on the way to full equality, whereas for Tocqueville the race for distinction is one of the reasons for a constant transformation of equality into inequality. For Taylor’s politics of recognition, equality is the final goal, for Tocqueville it remains the ideological starting point that, ironically enough, creates a strong need for all members of society to emphasize their difference. Taylor’s equal recognition would thus merely create the conditions from which Tocqueville takes his point of departure - for him the search for recognition can never be fully satisfied, because we 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 Reading for Recognition 297 7 Cf. in contrast the following passage from Fanon’s essay “The Black Man and Recog‐ nition: ” “An Antillean who meets a friend after an absence of five or six years will greet him aggressively. This is because in the past both of them had a predetermined position. The inferiorized one believes he has to enhance his standing, and the other is determined to keep his own superiority” (186). can never have enough of it, so that the struggle for recognition is constantly rekindled. From the perspective of Tocqueville, the struggle for recognition is therefore interminable, inherently unstable, always and inevitably marked by asymmetries. Among other things, this can explain an aspect that the identity politics of the new social movements hardly ever acknowledged or acknowledged only grudgingly and defensively, namely that the struggle for recognition also takes place within minority groups. For the most part, the status order of color has been one of the taboos of identity politics. 7 What Tocqueville realized was that democracy and equality do not simply go together but that they can also stand in conflict with one another, because the democratic pursuit of equal recognition will lead to new asymmetries in power relations and to reconfigurations of the status order. Literature and culture have played an increasingly important role in these reconfigurations. Tocqueville’s perspective can help zero in on one way in which literature and culture are shaped by the search for recognition in modern societies. Where apriori systems of recognition are replaced by new status orders and recognition regimes that are more open but also more volatile, constant struggle must be an essential element of the search for recognition. This struggle produces winners and losers, manipulators and victims, betrayers and betrayed, insiders and outsiders, all driven to establish a sense of distinction or moral superiority over others. This, one may claim, is the stuff of literature. Its leading genres, including tragedy and melodrama, satire and comedy, romance and adventure, have a widespread appeal, because they all tell stories about the place of humans in the moral and social status order. II. In the model of identity formation on which a politics of recognition is based, identity is created by images of the self. A more radical version is provided by theories in which identities are constructed within representations, including the illusion of a unified identity for which Lacan’s description of the mirror phase has become the model. In evading the prison house of a unified identity, the idea of a multiple, fragmented identity has become an important topic. But, as I have argued in a different context, a “multiple identity” only makes 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 298 Winfried Fluck 8 I have discussed this aspect in “Multiple Identities.” sense as yet another new identity construct of an “I” that provides continuity and coherence to a wide spectrum of experiences and roles. 8 The “I” does this through (self-) narration, which creates cultural and personal meaning by linking a diverse array of experiences in temporal sequence and providing them with meaningful connections. In this process, images play an important role, but they cannot impose unity on identity, because identity is the result of an ongoing process of narration that is put together by an “I” out of a range of choices drawn from the personal and the cultural imaginary. Although the claim may appear counterintuitive in view of the seemingly self-evident iconic facticity and strong immediate impact of images, they remain nevertheless subordinate to narrative, because they depend on a narrative context to become meaningful. As a decontextualized form, the image cannot speak “for its own sake” and “in its own terms.” In order to become meaningful in a person’s life, the image has to wait for “the invention of a ‘story’ in which each image has its say” (Trachtenberg 70). The meaning of the image is produced by the narrative context we bring to it. The same is true of bodily experiences. Although these may be “direct” and may thus appear as “unmediated,” they only become meaningful experiences as part of a self-narrative. Following Margaret Somers, we can characterize such an emphasis on nar‐ rative as a shift from representational to ontological narrativity. Her argument deserves an extensive quotation: Before this shift, philosophers of history had argued that narrative modes of repre‐ senting knowledge (telling historical stories) were representational forms imposed by historians on the chaos of lived experience. Recently, however, scholars are postulating something much more substantive about narrative: namely, that social life is itself storied and that narrative is an ontological condition of social life. Their research is showing us that stories guide action; that people construct identities (however multiple and changing) by locating themselves or being located within a repertoire of emplotted stories; that ‘experience’ is constituted through narratives; that people make sense of what has happened and is happening to them by attempting to assemble or in some way to integrate these happenings within one or more narratives; and that people are guided to act in certain ways, and not others, on the basis of the projections, expectations, and memories derived from a multiplicity but ultimately limited repertoire of available social, public, and cultural narratives. (613-14) Narratives are not representations of identity, then, they constitute identity. To reconceptualize identity as narrative identity (Ricoeur speaks of “the narrative 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 Reading for Recognition 299 9 See Ricoeur, “Life.” 10 Cf. Ricoeur’s remarks on the function of plot as synthesis: “it unifies components as widely divergent as circumstances encountered while unsought, agents of actions and those who passively undergo them, accidental confrontations or expected ones, interactions which place the actors in relations ranging from conflict to cooperation, means that are well-attuned to ends or less so, and, finally, results that were not willed; gathering up all those factors into a single story turns the plot into a unity which one could call both concordant and discordant (which is why I like to speak of discordant concord or concordant discord)” (426). Every work, every narrative is thus “an original production, a new being within the realm of discourse. The reverse, however, is no less true: innovation remains a strategy governed by rules” (430). 11 This also means that to tell an ongoing story about oneself should not be understood as setting us on a sure path to self-knowledge. 12 In theoretical discussions of the issue, two different explanations are given for this disruption. Phenomenological and pragmatist theorists refer to the discontinuity produced by the temporality of existence. See, for example, Ezzy’s reference to George Herbert Mead: “The past and, by implication, the future are continually reinterpreted because, according to Mead, the emergent present appears as continually novel and identity which constitutes us” 9 ) means to move away from theories of identity formation that have dominated literary and cultural studies in recent decades. On the one hand, identity is not simply established by recognition of one’s culture or one’s difference or one’s otherness, even if that recognition makes up for centuries of discrimination. Nor is identity merely the result of discursive subject formation by means of interpellation. The politics of recognition fails to take into account that the search for recognition is a struggle not only for equality but also for individual distinction. Identity formation through a recognition of cultural identity can thus at best describe a context in which identity formation takes place. The theory of discursive subject positioning by interpellation, on the other hand, fails to take the constitutive role into account that narrative plays in the formation of identity. From the perspective of narrative identity, the claim of subjection theories of recognition that identity is constituted through iteration remains unconvincing. Narration, including self-narration, is an interpretive activity that exceeds iteration, because it has to make sense of a constant flow of daily encounters and novel experiences, ranging from accidental encounters to unexpected com‐ plications, from personal conflicts to communal moments of togetherness, from rewards and pleasant surprises to the shock of disappointment. 10 In consequence of this constantly changing mix, the need for an ongoing reinterpretation and reconfiguration emerges. Thus, narrative identities are “very much in-process and unfinished, continuously made and remade as episodes happen” (Ezzy 247). 11 The narrative of identity is disrupted again and again and thus it also has to be rewritten again and again. 12 The “I” has to become the narrator of his or her life, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 300 Winfried Fluck discontinuous with that past” (242). The poststructuralist explanation lies in the opacity of the self, as argued, for example by Butler: “I am always recuperating, reconstructing, even as I produce myself differently in the very act of telling. My account of myself is partial, haunted by that for which I have no definitive story. I cannot explain exactly why I have emerged in this way, and my efforts at narrative reconstruction are always undergoing revision. There is that in me and of me for which I can give no account… There are reasons that course through me that I cannot fully recuperate, that remain enigmatic, that abide with me as my own, familiar alterity, my own private, or not so private, opacity. I speak as an ‘I,’ but to not make the mistake of thinking that I know precisely all that I am doing when I speak in that way” (27, 37). Butler’s emphasis on the (often frustrating) twists and turns of self-narration certainly exceed the standard account of interpellation. 13 See also the following passage: “But what is left out if we assume, as some do, that narrative gives us the life, or that life takes place in narrative form? What intervenes upon narration to make narration possible that is not, strictly speaking, subject to being if only for the simple reason that the various experiences and identity positions he or she encounters have to be coordinated. As has been pointed out by the new cultural politics of difference, for example, a person does not only have a gendered identity or a class identity or a national identity, but all of the above, and these identity positions have to be meaningfully connected in narrative in order to allow for at least a minimal degree of continuity and consistency. This is not to say that we may not be “interpellated” into a gendered or racialized identity, but that, in the final analysis, this subject position is only a point of departure for very different lives. There is an obvious objection to be made at this point. Not only can narrators of life stories not always be authors of their lives, but one may also have reasonable doubts about the degree of freedom they have as narrators. In order to be able to construct a meaningful self-narrative, they must draw on narratives handed down by culture, and in order to gain social and cultural recognition, they must inscribe themselves into culturally accepted plots. This may result in a form of identity formation aptly described by Margaret Somers: “We come to be who we are (however ephemeral, multiple and changing) by being located or locating ourselves (usually unconsciously) in social narratives rarely of our own making” (606). Judith Butler makes a similar point in even stronger terms when she points out that the “norms by which I seek to make myself recognizable are not precisely mine” (26). Instead, recognition is dependent on “a set of norms that govern recognizability” (Butler 22). In seeking recognition, I submit to a recognition regime that establishes a cultural frame for recognition and, in doing so, puts constraints on the possibility of full recognition. Thus, “my account of myself is never fully mine.” Butler, in fact, speaks of a “dispossession of my perspective” that contests “the singularity of my story” (26). 13 But such 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 Reading for Recognition 301 narrated? We might approach an answer to this question by noting that the ‘I’ who begins to tell its story can only tell it according to recognizable norms of life narration, we might say; to the extent that it agrees, from the start, to narrate itself through those norms, it agrees to circuit its narration through an externality, and so to disorient itself in the telling” (32). 14 Even Butler does not want to go that far and concludes rather lamely: “We can surely still tell our stories but we will not be able to be very authoritative when we try to give an account with a narrative structure” (26). 15 The limits of narratorship and narrative reinterpretation are reached, on the other hand, when narratives are culturally tabooed or suppressed or when they are institutionally scripted. Thus, drawing on studies by Goffman, Ezzy draws attention to “the role of institutionally located power in the construction and maintenance of narratives, including narrative identities” (250). Goffman’s studies of the asylum “demonstrate that conventionalized plotlines used to interpret narratives of incest rendered many victims of incest silent because there was no plausible, culturally acceptable plot within which they could recount their experiences” (249). an argument must presuppose a pre-existent, singular “I” that is dispossessed by narrative, instead of positing, as Somers does, that the self is always and inevitably a social being and that it therefore gains a sense of self only through narration. This would mean that we will have to look at the particular norm that is transported by narrative and the way this is done, instead of considering the existence of a norm itself as the problem. Otherwise, if identity is constituted by narrative, and narrative is always and inevitably providing plots that are dependent on “a set of norms that govern recognizability,” the only way to escape this constraint would be to give up narrative altogether. 14 But, although the narratives on which we draw may rarely be “of our own making,” they are nevertheless not identical with the social narratives in which we inscribe ourselves. These social narratives may provide cultural frames of interpretation and furnish genre and plot structures for self-narration, but we still have to turn these into the scripts of our own life. We do this by linking social narrative and personal experiences forged in contexts like family, peer group, subculture, intimate relations, encounters with friends or strangers, but also through formative aesthetic experiences and other influences. The social narrative may be familiar, but, in the search for recognition, it still requires a narrator. People are constrained by a limited repertoire of culturally available narratives, but they must still interpret them to fit their own lives and to adapt them to their self-narratives. As Paul Ricoeur has put it: “In this way, we learn to become the narrator of our own story without completely becoming the author of our life” (437). 15 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 302 Winfried Fluck 16 Cf. Ricoeur: “From this double analysis we learn that fiction, particularly narrative fiction, is an irreducible dimension of the understanding of the self ” (435). 17 See, for example, Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics, which focuses on “recognition plots” that depict a shift from ignorance to knowledge. Although Felski offers a more differentiated discussion in a chapter on “Recognition” in her book Uses of Literature, her main focus also lies on recognition in the sense of increased (self-) knowledge: “Suddenly and without warning, a flash of connection leaps across the gap between text and reader, an affinity or attunement is brought to light” (23). “Recognition, in the sense I’ve been using it so far, refers to a cognitive insight, a moment of knowing or knowing again” (28, 29) 18 This transformation from inferiority to superiority can be considered the main mani‐ festation of a search for recognition in fictional texts. It is by no means restricted to fairy tales or popular wish fulfillment fantasies, once we realize that superiority does III. If we accept that identity is narrative identity and “that people construct identities (however multiple and changing) by locating themselves or being located within a repertoire of emplotted stories” (Somers), then a logical next step to take is to look at those narratives that seem especially useful for a search for recognition. 16 In effect, if recognition is indeed as central for life in a modern societies as I am claiming, then such stories should play a key role in cultural activities - which also means that these stories will be told again and again. However, in trying to focus on those narratives that seem especially useful for linking literature and recognition, it seems too narrow to focus on narratives with “scenes of recognition,” as some critics have done in an attempt to introduce the term recognition into literary and cultural analysis. 17 Instead, one should begin at a far more elementary level and look at those narratives through which our hunger for fiction is stimulated in the first place. I am thinking of childhood and, more specifically, of forms like the fairy tale, and would like to focus for a moment on one of the most popular and influential of these tales, the story of Cinderella. The story is generally known and the reason for its popularity and strong impact is easy to identify: at its center stands the miraculous (often magical) transformation of an ugly duckling into a princess. Or, to use the vocabulary of recognition: an experience of painful misrecognition and humiliation is transformed into triumphant recognition of the special value of a person who had long been considered inferior. This imaginary transformation constitutes one of the master narratives of fiction and forms an imaginary core of the Western archive of stories. In many, if not most cases, fictional texts tell stories about a transformation of inferiority into superiority, of weakness into strength, of worthlessness into worth, or, more generally speaking, of misrecognition into recognition. 18 They stage 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 Reading for Recognition 303 not have to be superiority of status or strength, but can also be moral superiority, intellectual superiority, superiority of character, subcultural claims of superiority, or the superiority of a presumably more authentic existence. 19 On this point, see my essay “Fiction and Justice.” emotional responses to experiences of inferiority in their forceful articulation of humiliation, shame, or rage, and they dramatize scenarios of resistance by depicting hair’s breadth escapes, glorious outsiderdom, successful rebellion, or even uncontrolled violence. This transformation of experiences of inferiority, weakness, worthlessness, and misrecognition has the function of restoring a sense of justice that has been violated and, by doing so, of reenvisioning a new, reconfigured status order. Indeed, one could call this the utopian core of fiction. Its working principle is the linkage of recognition and social critique, so that the fate of the individual can become the basis for a judgment on the state of society as a whole. 19 In fictional texts, calls for a better social order are thus often grounded in experiences of individual misrecognition, while the narrative drama arises from the question of how to overcome this misrecognition and how to turn it into an acknowledgment of this person’s special worth. The traditional stories of male and female socialization - the Cinderella story and the adventure story - illustrate the point by revealing that the initially smaller, weaker, less respected or less valued person proves to be superior after all. In literary studies especially, we have come to classify such narratives as children’s literature and therefore as almost unworthy subject matter. But this defensiveness obscures the extent to which they pervade modern and American culture. Our Cinderella example can be useful here again, for women’s literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth century is shaped widely and decisively by the motif. It forms the narrative core of the sentimental novel of the eighteenth century, the novel of manners of a Jane Austen and the so-called domestic novel of the first half of the nineteenth century, it shapes the gothic female novel from Jane Eyre to Rebecca, and it still forms the basic pattern in the realistic novels of a Henry James, albeit in such a complex fashion that many readers and critics often are no longer aware of this imaginary core. But unmistakably, Jamesian novels like Watch and Ward, Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, and even The Wings of the Dove tell artful versions of the Cinderella story. If we follow the innumerable variations of the motif, we can even draw a line from these eighteenth and nineteenth century texts to contemporary minority literature - I am thinking, for example, of a novel like The Color Purple by Alice Walker - and to contemporary popular culture where the motif continues to be central. All of this could yield rich material for a cultural history of recognition. It could tell us what forms of misrecognition dominated in particular periods, how people 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 304 Winfried Fluck 20 The adventure tale was an exemplary male genre for a long time. But recently, female adventuresses have become more frequent, just as there are now, on the other hand, movies on “Cinderella Man.” 21 It is striking to see how discussions of the adventure genre, including recent ones, fail to see this obvious dimension and, as a consequence, resort to the familiar thesis of a compensatory function when they try to explain the popularity of the genre: “It is only with the social, political, and cultural upheavals of the nineteenth century - industrialization, urbanization, population growth, failed political regimes - which stood in the way of individual agency that the model of the autonomous adventurer became attractive, serving a compensatory function in society” (Hügel 91, m.t.). Similarly, Petzold speaks of the obvious function “of giving to its readers simple and straight-forward pleasure that will neither need, nor bear, further analysis” (251). He then adds at another point: “For an ever-increasing reading public living in a thoroughly industrialized environment, the vicarious excitement of literary adventure may well have been the only escape from drudgery and boredom” (258). have responded to the asymmetries of structures of recognition, and how the means of transformation, in the fairy tale still the work of magic, was altered in several steps, until a credit card finally takes the place of magic in a movie like Pretty Woman. The male equivalent of the Cinderella story is the adventure story which can be told as action story, detective story, Western, war movie, pirate story, or classical journey into the unknown. No matter what the genre is, in its modern versions since Robinson Crusoe, this story of adventure usually follows the trajectory of a common man who is not yet sufficiently recognized in his worth at the start of the narrative, goes on a perilous journey, survives great hardships, overcomes many obstacles, triumphs over stronger enemies, kills the tyrant, rescues the damsel in distress, and finds the hidden treasure, exhibiting great courage and fortitude and thereby transforming initial inferiority into a hardwon sense of superiority, apparent weakness into strength, and powerlessness into power. Adventure, by definition, exceeds ordinary life and thus provides an ideal chance to solve the “Tocqueville problem” of how to distinguish oneself from other ordinary mortals. The hero has to undergo a series of challenging tests of his courage, skill, and strength, he has to face hardships and terrible dangers, and he has to defend himself successfully, although all the odds are against him. 20 The adventure story can thus also be seen as an exemplary narrative dramatization of a search for recognition. 21 Like Cinderella, the modern, postrank-society adventure hero rises from being a Nobody or a young fool to the level of supreme social recognition. In an article on popular TV series, Jane Espenson has pin-pointed the key promise of the adventure story. For her, the key to an explanation of the attraction of fantasy fare lies in the narrative pattern of a “Hero’s Journey”: “It’s told 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 Reading for Recognition 305 over and over again, and it works, over and over again. Dorothy Gale, Buffy Summers, Harry Potter, Charlie Bucket, Luke Skywalker, even Peter Parker, they all fit a very specific pattern. They’re living a life, sometimes a fine one, often a troubled one, but certainly one governed by ordinary rules, when suddenly the curtain is pulled back and a whole new world, or a new set of rules of this world, is revealed. And what’s more - and this is the important part - in that world, they are something special. They are the Chosen One” (Espenson). The Chosen One: one can hardly find a better description of the feeling of uniqueness and distinction that can result from successful adventure. Adventurers “love adventure because it means opportunities to prove one’s innate superior quali‐ ties” (Petzold 260). Adventurers are heroes and heroes are rare individuals who accomplish extraordinary things. An especially notable dramatization of this uniqueness that can be encountered in almost all genres and media is the David and Goliath narrative. This is probably one of the narrative patterns employed most frequently in all of Western culture, and it may be called the exemplary narrative of a transformation of inferiority into superiority, because inferiority already seems to manifest itself in bodily appearance and the transformation of weakness into strength can thus take on an especially triumphant note. No wonder this ur-narrative of a struggle for recognition has created a medium especially well-suited for itself, that of comics and cartoons. Over all, the adventure story has remained a basic, paradigmatic narrative pattern in Western culture, never outdated, it seems, from ancient myth to present day popular culture. And here, too, a line of development can be observed that has resulted in increasingly elaborate versions of the motif, from the historical novel and the novel of apprenticeship, the Bildungsroman, to the realistic novel and modern versions from The Great Gatsby to more contemporary novels of the 1950s and onward. However, the search for recognition in fictional texts does not always have to be successful. In certain social status groups - this could be a fascinating topic for a cultural sociology along the lines of Bourdieu - misrecognition is a recurrent topic and can even become a mark of distinction. This literature of misrecognition, too, has produced a wide spectrum of genres, ranging from tragedy and the melodrama of the nineteenth century to a tradition of social criticism focusing on the victim. In this context, feminist criticism, by drawing on the sentimental novel and the filmic melodrama, has outlined the paradoxical logic by which victimization can become a source of recognition and therefore, paradoxically, a form of empowerment. This narrative type has had a renaissance in ethnic literature that often takes its point of departure from extreme experiences of misrecognition. In one of the most powerful novels of this tradition, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 306 Winfried Fluck 22 See, for example, the chapter on “The Politics of Respectability” in Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent. Man, the full extent of this misrecognition is already expressed in the title of the book. In fact, I think that the history of American minorities could be fruitfully rewritten from this perspective, because it consists, after all, of a fight against assumptions of inferiority that has its own instructive cultural history, from violent rebellion to the sentimental quadroon tale to racial uplift, 22 from the artistic cosmopolitanism of the Harlem Renaissance to the angry nationalism of the Black Arts Movement and a more recent rhetoric of trauma. Finally, within a typology of narratives of recognition and misrecognition, an especially interesting type is provided by stories of outsiders who, in American culture, are often elevated to the status of romantic outlaws. The figure of the outlaw is ideally suited to highlight another central paradox of fictional texts and of aesthetic experience: ironically, criminal figures, from whom we would shy away in reality, can obtain a model dimension of strength and superiority in fiction and can thereby gain our admiration. The same applies to the figure of the outsider who is pushed to the margins of respectability in real life. But it is precisely the lack of recognition associated with that marginality that can make outsiders exemplary figures in the struggle for recognition, because they, too, start out from a position of apparent inferiority, so that their resistance can become a model of successful self-assertion. In the past, outsiders and outlaws were often linked with the idea of reestablishing justice in Robin Hood fashion. But in contemporary culture, such figures no longer need this kind of moral justification. They are recognized for their own sake, as outsiders and outlaws, because in their defiance they can embody the strength and superiority of an independent actor. To look at American society and culture in terms of struggles for recognition that lead to constant reconfigurations of superiority and inferiority refers us back to the imaginary core of a wide array of fictional texts. At the same time, it also opens up new perspectives for textual interpretation, because, instead of reducing interpretation to an identification of a cultural identity or a political position, such an approach will read texts as dramas in which the struggle for recognition is acted out in all of its tensions, conflicts, complications, and emotional ups and downs. Political readings rarely capture the reading experience in which we are often moved back and forth between different perspectives and develop strong, often conflicting emotional responses to the “eventfulness” of the drama that is set in motion by the struggle for recognition. Revisionist approaches are hardly interested in this ebb and flow of responses and emotions, although these must be one of the main reasons 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 Reading for Recognition 307 why we expose ourselves to a three-hundred-page novel or a two-hour movie. From a “Tocquevillian” postrank perspective, the constant twists and turns of such a novel are the reason to continue reading - because they enact ever new versions of a struggle that constantly produces new asymmetries. The struggle for recognition challenges dominant constellations of superiority and inferiority, and culture is the realm in which these conflicts and struggles are acted out on a symbolic level. Once we conceptualize the search for recognition as a drama in which ongoing attempts are made to reconfigure inferiority and superiority, then the constant turns of plot, changing character relations, often within single scenes, or narrator and reader positioning can take on new importance and can be better grasped as part of the emotional drama (and often trauma) created by the struggle for recognition. Looking at literature from the perspective of an ongoing struggle for recognition can help regain an important part of the drama that makes us read literature in the first place. IV. This necessarily brief and general outline of the central role of narratives of recognition in modern culture refers us back to the crucial question of what the specific contribution of fictional texts can be in this search and struggle for recognition. If their contribution consisted exclusively of stories of successful or failed recognition, we would have returned to a concept of literature that remains on the level of plot and that would seem to employ concepts of identi‐ fication as its main explanation of literature’s effect on its readers. And indeed, for many cultural critics, identification remains the dominant explanation of the powerful ideological effects of culture, because identification is considered a key mechanism for the production of identities. From this point of view, identification is the means by which a film, to give the most obvious example, manages to create (the illusion of) a unified identity in the spectator and thereby fixes identity in an ideologically charged subject position. However, in her essay “Feminine Fascinations: Forms of Identification in Star-Audience Relations,” Jackie Stacey argues convincingly that identification can take place in various forms: it can be based on similarity and difference, it can find expression in cinematic fantasies but also in extracinematic practices, and it can lead to quite 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 308 Winfried Fluck 23 See also the important distinction made by Felski: “Identification can denote a formal alignment with a character, as encouraged by techniques of focalization, point of view, or narrative structure, while also referencing an experiential allegiance with a character, as manifested in a felt sense of affinity or attachment. Critiques of identification tend to conflate these issues, assuming that readers formally aligned with a fictional persona cannot help but swallow the ideologies represented by that persona wholesale” (34). 24 See, for example, “Aesthetic Experience of the Image,” and “Playing Indian.” different modes of engagement. As a result, identification is usually partial and segmented. 23 Stacey’s differentiation of the concept of identification departs from the premise that identification results in one unified identity. Instead, she breaks down identification into a series of different and segmented activities. This allows her to complicate the identification model by emphasizing the diversity of possible forms of identification, and, as a consequence, the active engagement of the spectator in the creation of meaning. At this point, one might ask, however, to what extent the term identification is still useful. An alternative that might be even better suited to describe the full range of reader or spectator activities may be the transfer concept that I have outlined in a number of essays. 24 Its starting point is an observation Wolfgang Iser has made in his essay “Representation: A Performative Act,” where he provides the example of a reading of Hamlet: “In this respect the required activity of the recipient resembles that of an actor, who in order to perform his role must use his thoughts, his feelings, and even his body as an analogue for representing something he is not” (244). Since we have never met a character like Hamlet and know in fact that he never existed, we have to bring him to life by drawing on our own associations, feelings, and even bodily sensations. This imaginary recreation follows along textual lines, but it also has to draw on the reader’s own experiences and cultural codes in order to make sense of the text. An example is provided by the role of somatic empathy in the reception of fictional texts, about which Bärbel Tischleder writes: “Only on the basis of our own experiences can we know what it feels like to stroke a piece of fur, to cut ourselves, to run around naked in the snow or to carry heavy bags” (78). Thus, in the act of reception the fictional text (or aesthetic object) comes to represent two things at the same time: the world of the text and imaginary elements added to it by the reader in the act of actualizing the words on the page. In fact, it is this double positioning that can be seen as an important source of aesthetic experience, because it allows us to do two things at the same time: to articulate imaginary elements and to look at them from the outside. Aesthetic experience is thus a state “in-between” in which, as result of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 Reading for Recognition 309 25 The adventurer is a perfect example for an easy transfer, because psychology and interiority remain secondary. See Früchtl, “Mythic heroes and psychology do not go together well” (75, m.t.) What counts are the corporeality of the hero, his athleticism, his talent for action, in short, his performance. 26 Using the term analogy to grasp the relations that can be set up between reader and text means to go beyond mimetic assumptions of direct likeness or resemblance, but even beyond metaphorical affinity. Thus, readers’ responses can be unpredictable: “Antigone has intrigued straight men and lesbians, Norwegians and South Africans; you do not need to be an Irishman to admire James Joyce.” Felski continues: “We all seek in various ways to have our particularity recognized, to find echoes of ourselves in the world around us. The patent asymmetry and unevenness of structures of recognition ensure the doubling structure of fictionality, we are, in the words of Iser, “both ourselves and someone else at the same time” (244). Such a model of aesthetic experience moves away from the view that reading a fictional text results in the creation of a unified identity. What used to be called identification is really a series of different and segmented attachments. Because of this segmented use, the relation to the text is established, not by identification with a particular figure, but by analogues between a potentially wide range of textual elements and the recipient’s imaginary (including affects, feeling, moods, corporeal schemata, etc.). If identification were the main mode of reception, then responses to fictional texts and other aesthetic objects should be fairly predictable. However, the history of reception of any fictional text or aesthetic object is (almost) unpredictable and potentially interminable. There will always be new readings emerging, not only in different historical periods but also among readers or viewers of the same period, society, or class. The explanation lies in the fact that reading and reception work by means of structural analogy: “In the image consciousness,” writes Sartre in his study of the imaginary, “we apprehend an object as an analogon for another object” (52). 25 This, in fact, is one of the reasons why we can relate to an outlaw or outsider: we do not identify with him but establish analogies to those aspects of his persona that we want to incorporate. We take the heroism and ignore the criminal context. Even in the ideologically most conformist domestic novel, there may be rebellious stances on the part of characters that readers can activate for such a transfer, although the rebellious character in the novel may in the end conform to the patriarchal order. The actual experience and effect of the novel may thus be exactly the opposite of what its ideological project is supposed to be. This can provide one of the explanations for the attractiveness of popular culture and the striking, seemingly contradictory phenomenon that popular culture is regularly criticized for its ideological nature and at the same time praised for its subversive force. 26 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 310 Winfried Fluck that books will often function as lifelines for those deprived of other forms of public acknowledgment” (43). 27 Ricoeur therefore describes self-extension as reconfiguration: “Let us stay for a moment on the side of the narrative, i.e., the side of fiction, and let us see how it leads back to life. My thesis here is that the process of composition, of configuration, does not realize itself in the text but in the reader, and under this condition configuration makes possible reconfiguration of a life by the way of the narrative” (430). The fact that reading is based on analogizing can help us understand why we continue to be interested in texts from past centuries that describe entirely different living conditions. It can help explain why readers and critics will rarely agree on the meaning of a text, because, inevitably, these readers will be using different analogies for different self-narratives. And finally, it provides an explanation of why we may read one and the same text differently on different occasions, because we will continue to discover new analogies that suggest ways to rewrite our self-narrative. If the concept of identification is replaced by that of a transfer, and transfer points to a reading activity that makes sense of the text by segmented attachments and constant analogizing, then the usefulness of narrative fictions in the struggle for recognition can be more clearly grasped. In reading, we establish analogies to those aspects that fit into our own narrative of identity or are especially meaningful or moving from the perspective of this narrative. In this sense, narrative can be meaningfully linked to the concept of identity: fictional texts and other aesthetic objects provide material that allows the reader to rewrite and extend the narrative of his own identity. The encounter with an aesthetic object holds the promise of self-extension because I can attach imaginary elements of my own world to another world and become temporarily somebody else. This somebody else engages me, because, in bringing him or her to life by means of a transfer, I will draw on analogies (not always positive ones) to parts of myself. But these parts of myself are now placed in a new context and are thus reconfigured. 27 This is the reason why the transfer that takes place in aesthetic experience should not be confused with terms like projection or mere wish fulfillment. In reading, I enter another world on its own terms; however, as a rule I also resist being completely absorbed by that other world. On the one hand, I am experimenting with becoming somebody else; on the other hand, I do not want to give up my own identity altogether. I want to keep open the possibility of dissociation. Fictional texts can be provocative, irritating, at times even repulsive. They often provoke us to change our views and emotional attachments during the reading process. At one point, we may strongly sympathize with a character, at another point, we may be put off by his behavior. Frequently, we have secret sympathies 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 Reading for Recognition 311 28 In his study Das unverschämte Ich, Früchtl offers a fine description of this state of inbetweenness when, in an analysis of John Ford’s movie The Searchers, he describes the situation of the film spectator as “double positioning”: “The Western, Ford makes abundantly clear, is a projection, the invention of a threeand four-dimensional world with the help of light sounds, and moving images. It is this staged aspect that creates an ambivalent attitude toward film: We want to be ‘inside’ the film, and yet not quite, thus, outside, but not quite” (64). for villains but then nevertheless expect them to be punished. At times, we confer sympathies, at other times, we withdraw them and switch loyalties. The common denominator in all of these cases lies in the challenge to negotiate and mediate between the double constituents of aesthetic experience, myself and someone or something else. In exposing myself to another world, I have to decide at any given moment of the reading process how far I want to go in entering this other world; in seeking self-extension, I have to decide how far I want to go in becoming somebody else. 28 Reading is a constant negotiation between these two possibilities. There is no recipe for the right kind of balance, and every new reading therefore is potentially a new adventure. V. If reading is not seen as a process of identification but, as I have argued in this essay, as a an imaginary transfer that opens up in two directions, then the act of reading can be reconceptualized: “Aesthetic reception can be described (…) as a process of imaginary transfer between the reader and the text, and this transfer itself shares many elements of an intersubjectively conceptualized process of recognition” (Voelz 134). This interaction may be described as a dialogue between two narratives: the narrative of the text and the narrative of the reader. Its result is a subject position of nonidentity: a double positioning in which we can be both ourselves and somebody else at the same time. In reading we move back and forth between the two positions, and the recognition provided in, and through, the act of reading is not tied exclusively to either one of these positions. It is the result of text and reader interacting. In this sense, reading goes beyond mere self-confirmation, just as a self-narrative goes beyond a mere monologue. Both are constituted by the need to account for encounters with another world; in this sense, the self does not merely project itself onto another. The other and the self-interact to extend, and potentially reconfigure, the self-narrative. As Ricoeur puts it: “More precisely, the meaning or the significance of a story wells up from the intersection of the world of text and the world of the reader” (430). This interaction may not qualify as “real” 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 312 Winfried Fluck 29 Indeed, approaches that see the struggle for recognition as an encounter with alterity stress the unknowability of the other. In referring to the Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero, Butler states: “For her, the question most central to recognition is a direct one, and it is addressed to the Other: ‘who are you? ’ This question assumes that there is an Other before us, one we do not know, whom we cannot fully apprehend, one whose uniqueness and nonsubstitutability set a limit to the model of reciprocal recognition offered within the Hegelian scheme, and to the possibility of knowing another more generally” (24). reciprocity but the recognition gained in the act of reading is nevertheless an encounter with another world that has the potential to change the reader’s world - just as, on the other hand, one result of this encounter will be a new interpretation, even of well-known and often interpreted works. In the act of reading, both sides are affected and potentially transformed. Such a description of the reading process modifies a view in which recogni‐ tion can only be gained in an encounter with another person. In effect, the empirical promise of this encounter may be deceptive in the first place, because the other, even if present, must nevertheless also be mentally constructed. This is the reason why it is not only books that can be misinterpreted but also people with whom we interact. Since, strictly speaking, the other person is unknowable, we respond on the basis of a mental image - as George Herbert Mead was the first to emphasize when he described self-formation in social interaction as “taking the attitude of the other.” In this process, we construct others through images, often memory images, in an imaginary anticipation of their response, and the images to which we respond already present interpretations and not simply “real” encounters. 29 Similarly, when we are asked to recognize the cultural identity of a particular group, we are responding to a mental construct of that group. For a number of reasons, it may be more rewarding to gain recognition from “empirical” encounters. But epistemologically, reading literary texts is not a categorically different form of encountering otherness. Identity formation, then, cannot be exclusively linked to encounters with persons, and insofar as recognition plays a key role in identity formation, this also applies to recognition. One may argue that the conditions of modern life, above all in cities with their growing anonymity and an increasing number of encounters between strangers, have shifted social experience to such increasingly “imaginary” modes. One of the challenges in discussing the concept of recognition lies in the fact that it is used in at least two different meanings, as a search for attention and acknowledgment of one’s existence (Beachtung), and as full acceptance based on mutual respect (Achtung). The difference between Taylor and Tocqueville can also be described as a shift from one meaning to the other, a shift that the communitarian philosopher 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 Reading for Recognition 313 30 See, for example, Honneth’s self-characterization of his approach to recognition as “a critical theory of society that seeks to locate its normative foundation in the act of reciprocal recognition” (“Recognition as Ideology” 324). As it turns out later in the essay, this is only half of the story, however, because, in trying to clarify what true reciprocity is, Honneth comes up with the criterion of “material fulfillment” (“Recognition” 347). On the other side of the spectrum stand those approaches that see the struggle for recognition in principle and by definition as an encounter with alterity. In contrast, Fraser stresses that “the justice account of recognition avoids the view that everyone has an equal right to social esteem. That view is patently untenable, because it renders meaningless the notion of esteem. The account of recognition proposed here, in contrast, entails no such reductio ad absurdum. What it does entail is that everyone has an equal right to pursue social esteem under fair conditions of equal opportunity” (4, m.t.). 31 I deal with this aspect extensively in “Fiction and Justice.” Taylor deplores and the liberal Tocqueville sees as an inevitable consequence of democracy. While the criterion of exchange does not disqualify literature as a source of recognition once we define the reading process as a transfer process, another aspect may be more problematic. Almost all recent debates about recognition in philosophy and social theory focus on the question whether and to what extent recognition can constitute a new and broadened criterion for a just society. These accounts are normatively oriented, and one of their main challenges consists in the task of integrating different claims for recognition into generally acceptable norms of equality, fairness, and justice. 30 The search for recognition in literature, on the other hand, may often be highly effective in dramatizing severe cases of social injustice, but their depiction represents the views of individuals or groups who want to call attention to their own, often highly subjective experiences of misrecognition. Literature articulates individual claims for recognition that need not necessarily be reconciled with other claims and need not be normatively justified. This, in effect, may explain the lack of interest in literary representations shown by philosophical and social theorists of recognition. One of the major differences between fictional texts and normative accounts is that fictional texts can base the legitimacy of their claims on the power of aesthetic experience and its seemingly self-evident authority. 31 Thus, while normative accounts try to integrate different claims in order to arrive at a convincing normative principle, the subjective accounts of literature go exactly in the other direction by producing an ever-expanding plurality of claims. In the discourse on recognition, then, we encounter normative accounts of recognition on the one side, and open, and often unashamedly subjective, calls for recognition on the other. It would be a mistake, however, to posit one against the other. Both operate on different levels and are, in the final analysis, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0017 314 Winfried Fluck 32 Recognition is thus one of the stabilizing forces of the social system, since it is based on certain norms of recognizability, but, at the same time, it is also a continuous threat to the stability of the system, because it constantly revives and refuels individual claims. complementary. As a form that encourages individual expression, often of a transgressive nature, literature is a social institution with a special potential and privilege to articulate individual claims for recognition. Philosophical and social theories, on the other hand, are involved in an ongoing debate about the legitimacy and normative implications of such claims. In a time of pluralization, fictional texts constantly introduce new claims; in doing so, they put pressure on philosophical and social theories to reconsider and, where necessary, to extend their normative accounts. 32 Thus, both discourses can be seen to nourish each other. Literature remains an important medium in which new claims for recognition can be articulated, just as, on the other hand, the concept of recognition provides a perspective on literature that can provide new and better explanations of its imaginary power. As we have seen, this power does not only derive from narratives of recognition or misrecognition, although these provide a central theme of literature. It also derives from the interactive mode of aesthetic experience that turns reading into a transfer and thereby opens up entirely new possibilities for a reconfiguration and an extension of the reader’s narrative identity. 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