Wilde's Mime Acts: Performing Minor Mimesis

Abstract

Abstract: Mimesis is not a minor literary and philosophical concept in western thought. Still, an immanent, marginalized, and in this sense minor conception of performative mimesis (from mimos , actor or performance) is currently informing the transdisciplinary field of mimetic studies. Supplementing Deleuze and Guattari's account of Kafka's "minor literature," this article focuses on Oscar Wilde's dramatizations of performative mimesis revealing that not only language is performative; human lives and bodies are also driven by "an imitative instinct." From The Picture of Dorian Gray to The Importance of Being Earnest , Wilde's dramatic impersonations of homo mimeticus allow him to do not only things with words (speech acts) but also to do things with affects and bodies (mime acts). In the process, he provides new steps to further the mimetic turn or re -turn to a minor, performative, and embodied theory of homo mimeticus .