Uses of Literature Quotes

“the phenomenology of recognition brings into play the familiar and the strange, the old and the new, the self and the non-self. It may help to confirm and intensify a sense of particularity, but it may also cut across and confuse familiar rubrics of identity. Recognition is about knowing, but also about the limits of knowing and knowability, and about how self-perception is mediated by the other, and the perception of otherness by the self. Precisely because of its fundamental doubleness, its oscillation between knowledge and acknowledgment, the epistemological and the ethical, the subjective and the social, the phenomenology of recognition calls for more attention in literary and cultural studies.”
― Rita Felski, Uses of Literature

“it encourages its readers to engage in similar acts of self-scrutiny.”
― Rita Felski, Uses of Literature

“We are fundamentally social creatures whose survival and well-being depend on our interactions with particular, embodied, others.”
― Rita Felski, Uses of Literature

“every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.”
― Rita Felski, Uses of Literature

“self and society are always interfused; there is no clear place where one ends and the other begins. Subjectivity is always caught up with intersubjectivity, personal experience awash with social and political meanings.”
― Rita Felski, Uses of Literature