Mimesis: The History of a Notion

Abstract

If we examine the history of the word mimesis, often rendered as imitation, we discover that the ease with which it is used cloaks a myriad of meanings that can be and have been attached to the term. Indeed, this indeterminacy is perhaps the most constant feature of mimesis. Mimesis moves with history and takes on forms appropriate to each historical period. Today the concept is experiencing a renaissance all the more astounding in light of the criticism on it received during the artistic upheavals at the turn of the century. Erich Auerbach's book returned mimesis as a kind of leitmotif for representing social reality in Western literature. Describing mimesis as an ongoing attempt to approximate social reality, Auerbach wrote a purely intellectual history, without considering semiotics, the material conditions of written communication, and the anthropological dimension of literature. Exactly these aspects form the crux of twentieth-century efforts to take up the concept of mimesis. Picking up on Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno elaborates mimesis as the core of his aesthetic theory. In the work of Jacques Derrida, mimesis is used to see processes of signification from a new perspective, one that is to overcome the boundaries of semiotics.