It reminds me of the new sincerity trend in literature and other creative realms.

This is a weird point. In the absence of a divine instance telling you what to do and who to be, are you not supposed to discover your 'true self' on your own, which is supposedly desirable?

It may also be a defensive mechanism of our psyche. You can only take so much negativity without finding yourself profoundly depressed.

It's interesting how both of these functions of literature follow the first one named - recognition as establishing a sense of identity.

Ridiculous.

The figure of Don Quixote is also an example of someone who is intoxicated by literature to such extent that he cannot tell reality from fiction and confuses himself for someone else.

And what does it say about our culture?

It is an interesting metaphor here, to refer to literature as "diet," not only because it implies that literature gives us food for thought, but it also, by extension, implies that we need literature or narratives in general to keep us (our sense of identity) alive.

The same is partially true for the most Shakespearean plays, isn't it?

E.g. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood,

And it helps us to foster a stronger sense of ourselves.

Lovecraft comes to mind, because his horror is the epitome of strangeness that is not even in the vicinity of comprehension.

Not to mention all the parasocial relationships with the projections of different characters in the stories and so on.

This is what I meant talking about the importance of social contexts/situations before. We are not watching the world from afar, we actively experience it and ourselves in it.

So, it is not just seeing but also the feeling of being seen, isn't it?

Maybe, it is also worth-mentioning that we have all sorts of "knowing" moments in our lives, from the Eureka moments when we remember where we put the keys to recognizing someone's face, but when we are talking about literary recognition, we talk about knowing "the truth," don't we? Do we feel our sense of self confirmed or shattered or something else (your worldview does not have to be destroyed, there does not have to be the aforementioned "shift," in my humble opinion, for us to feel like we recognize something in the book)? Where does this feeling of mattering comes from and what does it implicate about us?

This is exactly what I was taking about earlier. How can you measure this or even speculate about it with any seriousness if the whole argumentation leads you into a dead end?

See my notes above.

I feel like this whole passage begs the question whether "misrecognition" is such a fatal, inherently flawed thing. We experience our identity by not just meditating on our navels, do we? We need context, we act withing the frameworks of situations and narrative and thereby actively construct and rebuild ourselves, as do our physical bodies. It is true that we are perhaps inevitably prone to mystification of others, because we do not have any innate/empirical knowledge of them, but do we not mystify ourselves either, given the fact that our memory is subjective and our perception limited?

But does not here lie the difference between the self as a thing-in-itself and the image of that said thing? Any image would be an approximation, a version of the original.

See my notes above.

Would it not be, on contrary, naive to assume that we can access some objective truth and read neutrally, by subtracting ourselves from the practice? In my opinion, it is a healthy form of solipsism to acknowledge that we all read and simultaneously filter our reading through our lenses of perception (e.g. personal history, recent past etc.). In that sense, every book is about "me," because it is one of the evolutionary reasons we as species obtain information so avidly - to learn from it, by superimposing what we have just learned onto what we (might) need/want/know.

It is worth mentioning that both concepts are not mutually exclusive. Our socialization gives us the framework of assumptions to help us navigate ourselves in the society, and we use it later on when we reflect on who we are and what we believe in.

Given the described here, it comes as no surprise that this plot is particularly popular among the younger audiences, especially teenagers who feel like they must "break free." And it also begs the question whether we read the stories of the same kind differently when we are older.

Themselves.

Which makes sense, because our sense of self is in part defined by the concept of the other, and so, we must see what is "us" and what is "not us."

This is a very interesting topic (and I can't wait to hear what Larissa will say about it in her presentation in our cultural studies class). Often, there are stories and books in the stories and books that essentially assert dominance of the written word by predicting something or changing something, etc. These objects and narratives, in my opinion, raise the question about how much do we allow ourselves to be influenced by the books we read. Is it possible that we consciously or subconsciously model ourselves after the figures we like (like Bechdel's father did in the later chapters of her Fun Home), and by virtue of doing so, create self-fulfilling prophecies?

In the light of the very first question in this chapter, can we compare a book to a mirror, in the sense that the way we read and interpret is a reflection of who we are?

It is interesting how Felski puts an emphasis on the written words, now that I'm thinking about it. Is it possible that we tend to perceive what is communicated to us in a book differently than when there is a person we can actually mentally attribute the said to? Is it possible that we have less bias against some ideas when they reach us from the printed pages (or even messages in chats) and not from someone's mouth and eyes, because then they do not belong to an instantly accessible human being? And would it also have something to do with the way we perceive information when we read, because we tend to slow down and be less selective, etc?

One should probably start this chapter holding in mind the implications of the word itself. Broadly speaking, the term "cognition" means perception and understanding, but by adding the re- suffix, we imply that something can be understood again, this time differently. What has to happen for us to recognize ourselves or anything else?