'shock of recognition'

Some of the results of a web troll for connections with this phrase:

Text of Hawthorne and His Mosses [via Wayback machine], in which Melville first mentions...

The "weight of scholarly opinion since 1950" assumes Melville wrote his fawning essay "Hawthorne and His Mosses" shortly after this meeting (Jones 187). It is in this essay that Melville describes his "shock of recognition" in Hawthorne's genius--a recognition of his own potential. (http://cctr.umkc.edu/userx/acline/moby.html)

Wilson, Edmund. The shock of recognition; the development of literature in the United, 2nd ed. New York, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1955.

Hunter S. Thompson: Melville said it, in a slightly different context: "Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round". (http://www.cornboy.com/hst/gallery/articles/hunter_in_playboy.html)

>. . . . divine, i.e. outside our time/space referents. ( The etymology of
>the word "numinous" by the way means "to wink.)" When we look at a work of
>art, or a myth, and something "winks" at us, then we know not only that we
>are also being seen, but that such an incarnated image is the carrier of
>those invisible energies.
>
>If it "winks" at us, it is because is recognizing something like it in us
>already, something of which we were heretofore unaware, perhaps. This is
>what Melville called "the shock of recognition," that is, re - cognition,
>like to like. J. Hollis (http://csf.colorado.edu/lists/jbt/hollis/0098.html)

I rescued from digital oblivion Sara Smollett's May 12, 1999 Hawthorne and Melville Inquiry Log (a simply superb example of a 'logfile', before there were blogs)

Herman Melville biography

from http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/104.5/br_91.html:

In 1943, Edmund Wilson borrowed Herman Melville's term "shock of recognition" to describe the period beginning in the 1840s when "genius becomes aware of its kin," as writers recognized that they were jointly creating an American literature. Although Daniel Belgrad does not use Melville's term, in this illuminating study he documents similar, less nationalistic shocks of recognition in the 1940s and 1950s encompassing a wider range of arts. Painters such as Willem de Kooning and Grace Hartigan, ceramist Peter Voulkos, and writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg found passions similar to their own in the jazz experiments of such bebop musicians as Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk. In Belgrad's words, "the long thread through the cultural fabric of the period" that connected the efforts of these artists with one another—and with many others, including dancer Merce Cunningham, poet Charles Olson, and social critic Paul Goodman—was "the will to explore and record the spontaneous creative act" (p. 1).

The Shock of Recognition, a play by Richard Nelson about the first meeting of Melville and Hawthorne... (http://www.mobydick.org/calendar.html)

Great works of literature, Melville had come to think, are possible only because individual imaginations collaborate with a greater, more all-encompassing, transpersonal inspiration. "Genius the world round stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition unites them all." (http://www.mtsu.edu/~dlavery/inspir.htm)

...and anybody who gets this far deserves to be reminded of Stanley Crouch on Moby-Dick and Jazz and Moby-Dude