Theory Of Mimesis Research Articles

Literary Biomimesis: Mirror Neurons and the Ontological Priority of Representation

This article traces the contributions of mirror neuron theories in neuroscience to debates on literature and related theories of mimesis or, as Erich Auerbach defined it, the representation of reality. The “ensemble” descriptor used for the visualization technologies on which we currently depend to chart the neuronal firing in the human brain is also an apt term for an additional translational issue between structure and what one might call the philosophical domain. The most carefully established data of brain activity is empirically confirmable on the micro level. Moving from it to the so-called “higher order” or more complex issues of meaning and use by humans, not least in cultural life, requires in effect a translation from micro evidence to ensemble evidence. Within the neurosciences, such translational processes are objects of seduction and suspicion at once. Yet an “ensemble” principle is not only active in brain mapping evidence, but in the “single brain” to “social brain” evidence field for neural mirroring. The brain in isolation represents only a slice of the field of the dialogic brain, the brain performing social cognition of others, the brain bringing the other’s existence into the individual’s embodied space through the individual’s internal simulation. This essay moves from the concept of the social brain to the suggestion of an ontological priority of representation in the mirror neuron paradigm. Is literature itself a relative of brain mirroring processes, and thus a form of biomimesis? And if we recognize literature and other representational processes as a part of “the human ensemble,” should we also recognize the capacity of literature and other art forms to mimetically influence our performance of physiological being?

The Very Model of a Modern Epic Poem

An epic‐length poem without a determinate plan, and therefore remarkably accommodating of contingency, Byron’s Don Juan is founded on a distinctly modern understanding of reality as a subjectively realizable potentiality. But just as traditional and novel literary forms can coexist with each other, so can existing and emergent concepts of reality, however uneasily. In Don Juan the tension between this new concept of reality and that presupposed by the theory of artistic mimesis manifests itself in Byron’s flouting of the same epic conventions to which he professes his adherence.

Narrating the visual in Shakespeare

This book examines Shakespeare's fascination with the art of narrative and the visuality of language. Richard Meek complicates our conception of Shakespeare as either a 'man of the theatre' or a 'literary dramatist', suggesting ways in which his works themselves debate the question of text versus performance. Beginning with an exploration of the pictorialism of Shakespeare's narrative poems, the book goes on to examine several moments in Shakespeare's dramatic works when characters break off the action to describe an absent, 'offstage' event, place or work of art. Meek argues that Shakespeare does not simply prioritise drama over other forms of representation, but rather that he repeatedly exploits the interplay between different types of mimesis - narrative, dramatic and pictorial - in order to beguile his audiences and readers. Setting Shakespeare's works in their literary and rhetorical contexts, and engaging with contemporary literary theory, the book offers new readings of Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, Hamlet, King Lear and The Winter's Tale. The book will be of particular relevance to readers interested in the relationship between verbal and visual art, theories of representation and mimesis, Renaissance literary and rhetorical culture, and debates regarding Shakespeare's status as a literary dramatist.

Experience in the Very Moment of Writing: Reconsidering Walter Benjamin's Theory of Mimesis

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ateleological moment of learning through imitation. In general, we can learn something new through imitating models we are given, which embody the values of our own society, culture and institutions. This means that imitation is understood in terms of the representation or reproduction of original models. In this understanding of imitation, however, the creative aspect of imitation is missed. In relation to this I shall, first, consider learning through imitation in terms of Walter Benjamin's theory of mimesis discussed in his essay, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty.’ It begins by examining general understanding of the concepts of experience and writing. Second and third, while reconsidering the idea of imitation, I shall bring out the difference between mimesis and copying, based on Plato and Aristotle, and I shall examine the former, especially its involuntary aspect. Fourth, in order to consider the ateleological moment of learning through imitation as mimesis, I discuss the relation between mimesis and the chance event. Fifth, Benjamin's allegorical ‘anti-autobiography’ entitled ‘A Berlin Childhood around 1900’, which ponders the idea of childhood as otherness is considered in order to explore what is happening in the very moment of writing, driven by the chance event. To conclude, I shall show how the very moment of writing involves an unceasing transformation of the self.

Fokus på fiktionen stoppar mordet på Mozart!

How to Stop the Constant Killing of Mozart by Focusing Fictionality
 This text is a slightly expanded version of a conference speech, delivered at the University of Umeå 2010-10-14. My purpose is to point out the didactic potential of Aristotle’s mimesis theory, and in particular the idea that the human ability to create fictional worlds constitutes a special way of understanding reality (or rather the notions of reality that we are provided with by our senses and rational thinking). This idea is seen as a prerequisite of the exceptionally dialogic character of Russian literary theory from Potebnya to Bakhtin, and in order to show what that dialogic attitude really means, the contrary formalistic position of Boris Shklovsky – and especially his inability to understand the Aristotelian standpoint of Potebnya – is discussed in some detail. Proposing literary transfer as a modern key to dialogic reading, I try to illustrate what it might contribute even to a super reading of Homer like the one Erich Auerbach carries through in his Mimesis. Finally, I point out, with examples from French scholar Jean-Marie Schaeffer, how make-believe-theory can help to restore the reader as a human being and the literary text as a work of art – and thereby to stop the still on-going killing of Mozart that the Russian formalists, according to Bakhtin (in his – or Mevedev’s? – »Scholarly Salierism«) committed themselves to so long ago.

Print, chaos, and complexity: Samuel Johnson and eighteenth-century media culture

This book describes how eighteenth-century awareness of the interplay between fixity and instability in printed texts demonstrates the role print played in developing Samuel Johnson's awareness of print culture's impact on human beings ethically, politically, and aesthetically. The study traces the evolution and continuity of Johnson's ideas in these areas by describing the importance of print mediation for Johnson's approach to solving related epistemological and ethical dilemmas facing his generation from the Restoration to the late eighteenth century.Print, Chaos, and Complexity shows how Johnson's non-fiction prose allows him to suggest that categories of truth and virtue may be stabilized when the orderly disorder of texts is properly conceptualized and used to inform the theory and practice of mimesis. Thus Johnson helps shape ideas on mediation, epistemology, ethics, and politics in the Age of Johnson in Great Britain (1755-84). Mark E. Wildermuth is a Professor of English Literature and a Dunagan Research Fellow at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin.

Artful Deceptions: Verbal and Visual Trickery in French Culture / Les Supercheries littéraires et visuelles: La Tromperie dans la culture française (review)

Reviewed by: Artful Deceptions: Verbal and Visual Trickery in French Culture / Les Supercheries littéraires et visuelles: La Tromperie dans la culture française Julia Abramson (bio) Catherine Emerson and Maria Scott, editors, Artful Deceptions: Verbal and Visual Trickery in French Culture / Les Supercheries littéraires et visuelles: La Tromperie dans la culture française. Bern, switzerland: Peter Lang, 2006. 386 pp. $74.95 (cloth). To equip Ulysses for the last days of his wanderings after the Trojan wars, Athena gives him the withered visage and filthy clothing of a tramp. Shrunken limbs, ruined hair, and dimmed eyes efface the warrior's virile appearance. On Ithaca Ulysses confronts the greatest danger. His house swarms with Penelope's suitors. Transformed beyond recognition, he tests his entourage with tall tales about his own exploits. Through counterfeit, wily Ulysses unmasks the essential motives of his enemies as of his most loyal followers. From Ulysses' feints to the dodges of artistic realisms is only a small step. The motif of disguise here presents fundamental tensions that characterize representation in the West. The earliest theories of mimesis (imitation, eventually creative imitation) in the context of poetics and rhetoric play appearance against being, lie against truth, the real against shadowy reflection. In the Platonic scheme, categories of pure forms and their imitations, or the real and the merely realistic, carry a moral weight. The Aristotelian conception valorizes the logic of art. Artifice is necessary to achieve resemblance to the ordinary: "We can now see that a writer must disguise his art and give the impression of speaking naturally and not artificially. Naturalness is persuasive, artificiality is the contrary" (Rhetoric III.ii.17–20).1 Where Plato hesitates to imagine that truth resides in the concrete, Aristotle proposes that a universal, human truth can emerge from fictions. Convincing artfulness depends on a corresponding notion of artlessness. As with Ulysses' disguise, however, dichotomies of deception and transparency, artfulness and artlessness, are neither simply defined nor always opposed. Nor is a moral locus mapped in some simplistic fashion. Ends can justify means. Truth has many faces. The interest of mimesis for artistic fictions readily identifiable as such is clear. Its relevance for fakery is equally strong. Consider the forger. His realism may be literary or practical. The success of his deceptive venture depends upon his ability to respond to others' expectations about his artifice, whether painted canvas, printed bill, manuscript epistle, or novel. The artistic fake is doubly mimetic. It embodies the genre or form that it mimics. It further plays on circumstances of production or reception—although this game only becomes apparent once it is up and the fake revealed. Mimesis is essential to the range of deceptions spanning fiction to forgery, such as pastiche, practical jokes, farces and attrapes, philosophical and ludic mystifications, persiflage, and fraud. [End Page 105] Within the last twenty years, scholars in a variety of disciplines have taught us to consider fakery from as many perspectives. Of course, the lineage of the trickster is ancient. Particularly since the growth of nineteenth-century bibliographical "science," anthologies of fakes have proliferated. Collections from the Encyclopédie des farces, attrapes et mystifications (1964) edited by the OuLiPiens François Caradec and Noël Arnaud to Wolfang Speyer's treatment of pseudepigrapha in Die Literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum (1971) present examples of fakery that are fascinating in and of themselves. Beyond the compiling and outing impulses, recent decades have seen a welcome move to the articulation of theories, poetics, and analytic histories of fakery. The historian Anthony Grafton has argued that the enterprise of the forger twins that of the scholar and critic (see Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship, 1990). In Sándor Radnóti's The Fake: Forgery and Its Place in Art (1999), analysis of historical circumstance and cultural context repeatedly demonstrates the relevance, even the ethical necessity, of an essentialist view. By contrast, in his semiological writing, Umberto Eco argues that it is more appropriate to speak of a fake effect, if the idea of a fake presupposes understanding an author's intentions (I limiti dell'interpretazione, 1990). Despite real and theoretical blocks to perceiving authorial...

Gangster in guerilla face

Doble cara (double/two-faced) is a key trope in Salvadoran political folklore. It is a folk theory of mimesis, which attempts to `master the absent presence of the other' through a discourse of conspiracy. The term has a history in the US-funded Salvadoran civil war. In this article, I consider how doble cara has come to be deployed around a new and pivotal social subject — Salvadoran immigrant gang youth deported from the USA — and how these deported youth emerge as a packed and displaced sign for the trauma of post-civil war violence, the failed promise of peace, and ongoing entanglements between the USA and El Salvador. The article is written in conversation with Begoña Aretxaga, who inspired many of the questions explored here.

Mimesis in Educational Hermeneutics

Philosophy of education is regarded as an art of hermeneutics that integrates a theory of mimesis in its understanding of the educational transmission. The idea of the master is reconsidered in this perspective in order to overcome the old opposition between classicism and romanticism. In that way the author attempts to respond to the question: What is the secret to pedagogically sound education?

Mimesis

The desire for camouflage is the desire to feel connected. It is the desire to find our place in the world and to feel at home This article analyses this desire through Walter Benjamin's theory of mimesis. This is a linguistic theory that argues that we find meaning in the world through the discovery of similarities, We are therefore inclined to model ourselves on the world, and make ourselves similar to it According to Benjamin, it is children who have the greatest capacity to blend in with their environment in their games of hide-and-seek and so on. There is. then, something to be learnt perhaps from the behaviour of children — from their openness and powers of imagination — if we want to fully comprehend the mechanism by which we identify with our homes and architectural spaces

Fake logos, fake theory, fake globalization

This essay attempts to map out the global networking of counter‐feit production and consumption by considering the historical and economic complications of fake superlogograms in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mainland China as a point of departure. It traces not only the ‘capital logic’ of the counter‐feiting industry, which duplicates the international division of labour, but also its ‘cultural logic’, which creates the Euro‐American superlogograms under the spell of Western imperialist ideology. The essay is divided into three main parts to foreground the ‘glocal’ circulation of fake superlogos. The first part considers the famous French Louis Vuitton as a case study to explore the economic, historic and cultural formation of the logomania in East Asia piloted by Japan in the 1980s. The second part discusses the double cultural reproduction of fake logos in Taiwan as both an imitation of Japan and an imitation of Japanese imitation of Europe. The third part seeks to theorize the fake under the context of Asian consumption of the superlogo and to foreground further the historical change of how the ‘fake’ becomes ubiquitous, how the ‘fake’ could be produced out of no originals, and how the ‘fake’ turns out to be perfectly indistinguishable and doubly authentic, which could rewrite the whole theory of mimesis. A new theorization of ‘fake dissemination’ is attempted in this essay to map out the co‐dependent ongoing (de)construction between ‘fake globalization’ and ‘globalization.’ What we mean by ‘fake’ here is no longer the mere difference between real/fake; the ‘fake’ in ‘fake globalization’ means ‘counter‐feiting’ as well as ‘appropriating’. (In Chinese, ‘Jia’ means both ‘fake’ and ‘by a particular means’.) That is, counter‐feit products appropriate the power of globalization to disseminate themselves. ‘Fake globalization’ is the ‘dark flow’ within globalization; it counter‐feits and appropriates globalization, repetitively reduplicating and deconstructing it. ‘Fake globalization’ and ‘globalization’ are not a pair in binary opposition. ‘Fake globalization’ is the ‘subversion’ of global capitalism; it is subject to global superlogo fashion consciousness and simultaneously resistant to the manipulation of ‘glogocentrism’. This subversive fake globalization is different from the traditional anti‐globalization movement, which tends to highlight the protection of international worker's rights, anti‐monopoly and anti‐sweatshops, for the latter focuses chiefly on the ‘oppositional’ stance while the former stresses more the ‘reverse’ side of it. Fake globalization helps to turn globalization itself inside out and outside in. Fake globalization is not an external attack on globalization from without, but an internal exposure of how the historical and psychic formulations of the logics of global capitalism are subject to the cultural imagination under (western) imperialist ideology, and how they are influenced by the political‐economic deployment of international divisions of labour. What fake dissemination does is to expose from within the possibility and impossibility of ‘glogocentrism.’

The adoption of US GAAP by French firms before the creation of the International Accounting Standard Committee: an institutional explanation

This article is about the emergence of consolidated financial statements in France at the beginning of the 1970s. French firms were already using US GAAP and not the recommendations of French standard-setters as they used to do. The article has two aims: to document the choice of American Generally Accepted Accounting Practices by French firms before 1973 and to use institutional theory in order to explain why US GAAP was adopted. The cases studied are those of Saint-Gobain (adopted GAAP in 1970), Pechiney (adopted GAAP in 1972) and Rhône-Poulenc (adopted GAAP in 1973) using archival materials, annual reports and internal documentation. We also provide a financial statement analysis. Most studies about accounting choice have been conducted under the agency theory. More recently, alternative theories like the new institutionalism in organizational theory have also been used by researchers. We feel it could be productive to explain the phenomena in the lens of institutional theory. We document the decisive role of auditors such as Price Waterhouse in the emergence of accounting practices. We also insist on the use of accounting in the transformation of corporations into conglomerates. In conclusion, our data show that the use of internationally accepted standards is not an innovation, simply an imitation. Furthermore, our cases suggest that the mimesis theory of Rene Girard subsumes institutional theory.

Mimetic Mastery and Colonial Mimicry In the First Franco-Antillean Creole Anthology

The anonymous 1811 Idylles et chansons, ou essais de po�sie cr�ole has been received as a minor work of Creole poetry by a single author. This essay demonstrates that it is actually the first known Creole literary anthology, containing variations on works including the earliest published Creole poem, "Lisette quitt� la plaine," from mid-eighteenth century Saint-Domingue (Haiti). Since the anthology attests to the circulation and transformation of early Creole texts, it puts their presumed b�k� (white Caribbean-born) authorial origins into question. I interpret tensions in racial and linguistic hierarchies in "Lisette" in relation to two conceptualizations of slavery and literary voice: postcolonial theories of colonial mimesis, and historical commentaries on the poetic productivity of non-white members of colonial society.

Ricoeur versus Taylor on Language and Narrative

Abstract: Although Ricoeur and Taylor are often grouped together, their conceptions of language, literature, and practical reason are very different. The first half of this essay focuses on Ricoeur's theory of triple mimesis and narrative, showing how his attempt to synthesize Kant, Husserl, and structuralism results in a formalism that blocks out the ontological, hermeneutical, and historical dimensions of literature and practical reason. The second half of the essay develops Taylor's ontological conception of public imagination and illustrates the dynamics of this conception of language and interpretation by showing how literary works debate with each other over language, subjectivity, and reference. Narrative does not just order; it argues.

Drag King Magic

SUMMARYThis chapter seeks to theorize drag king practice through the lenses of alterity, liminality, and performance theory, while attempting to complicate and reinvigorate discussions of identity raised by drag. I examine the ways in which drag king performance plumbs the concept of “the Other,” and forces confrontation with a complex field of desire. Contemporary “queergirl” existence negotiates a range of desirable and desiring Others, from the polarities (i.e., butch-femme) unique to queer structures of desire, to the desire of those on the cultural margins for the power of those at the center, and vice versa. I employ anthropological theories of performance, mimesis, and liminality to establish a framework through which drag kings may be viewed as crucibles of this desire and agents of this power exchange. By performing maleness, drag kings expand and redraw the definitional boundaries of the male, interfere with the cultural power of mainstream maleness, and simultaneously transfer some of this power to themselves as queer women. At the same time, drag king existence forces a renegotiation of queergirl desire to encompass a range of masculinities. By performing/becoming the Other, drag kings engage in a practice of magic

The Lie with the Ounce of Truth

This article focuses on the bisexual fantasies of playwright and memoirist Lillian Hellman. It analyzes the 1934 Broadway success, The Children's Hour, and the short story “Julia,” in her second memoir (1973), turned into a film in 1976. Both works are organized around a bisexual triangle of two women and one man, with one woman positioned as a bisexual, the other as a lesbian. The first is the autobiographical character, who understands her position as opportunistic yet chooses survival. The latter has a superior moral courage but succumbs to compulsory heterosexuality. Based on my theory of labial mimesis and dual female protagonists, I argue that the combination of Hellman's internalized biphobia and her repressed bisexuality was the psychological basis for her realism as a writer. The article also examines Hellman's difficulty in relating to real women, somewhat eased in transcultural situations where her guard against same-gender intimacy was down. The article is partly based in archival research in the author's private papers at the Harry Ransom Center Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas.

The Cambridge introduction to modern British fiction, 1950-2000

Head, Dominic. Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 19502000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. viii + 307 pp. $65.00 cloth; $22.00 paper. This well-organized and -written study constitutes an excellent starting place for readers seeking to gain an overview of British fiction written during the second half of the twentieth century. Treating more than 100 novelists and 200 individual works, the book covers both key exemplars of and broad tendencies within postwar British fiction, anchoring its discussion within surrounding sociocultural developments. Indeed, for Dominic Head, who adapts Paul Ricoeur's theory of mimesis as a (multiphased) process of representation rather than imitation, the relation between fictional worlds and social contexts is synergistic, or mutually determinative. Readers draw on aspects of their experience to make sense of fictional texts that, reciprocally, help mold their sense of what is or could be the case in the world at large. In this respect, the dichotomy between realism and experimentalism is spurious: all texts at once ground themselves within and impinge back upon what interpreters assume to be real. author asserts, too, that this dialectical relation between fiction and experience affords a framework for understanding the social and historical role of postwar British fiction. Drawing on the philosophical and novelistic work of Iris Murdoch in the final pages of the book to bolster his argument, Head suggests that in an era in which once-dominant religious and political traditions no longer held sway, fiction came to be a powerful vehicle for socioethical reflection. Chapter 1, The State and the Novel, explores how an increasing sense of social atomization affected representations of political life in the postwar British novel. Here Head argues that, during the period in question, the political novel of public life gave way to novels concentrating on isolated individual lives. Fictions discussed in this chapter range from novels centering around the period immediately following the war, such as Rose Macaulay's World My Wilderness (1950) and Pamela Hansford Johnson's Humbler Creation (1959), to novels written during the social revolution of the 1960s and early 70s, such as Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange ( 1962) and Piers Paul Read's A Married Man (1979), to novels intimating full-scale social collapse, such as Hilary Mantel's Every Day is Mother's Day (1985). Chapter 2, Class and Social Change, discusses tensions between economic and ideological models of class status, exploring how the waning of class consciousness disrupts representations of working-class as well as middle-class experience. chapter progresses from class-conscious fictions written in the context of what came to be called The Movement in the 195Os, such as Kinglsey Amis' s Lucky Jim (1954), to the grittily realistic depictions of working-class life in works by such Angry Young Men as John Braine and Alan Sillitoe, to the portrayal of the equivocal consequences of class mobility in the novels of David Storey, to novels exploring the perpetually disenfranchised underclass that emerged during the 1980s and 90s, such as Li vi Michaels's Under a Thin Moon (1992), to Penelope Lively's premise, in Spiderweb (1998), that the very notion of class has become irrelevant. …

Bombistic Maximalism, Transparent Analysis, and Feminist Actionism: On Some Mimetic Techniques in Contemporary German Theatre

The premise of postmodernism, including the death of the author and the dissolution of the text into electronic media, has questioned the critical character of literature and theatre in relation to social structures. Feminist writers and artists such as the performance artist Ginka Steinwachs, the playwright Gisela von Wysocki, and the performance artist and filmmaker Valie Export, however, invigorate social analysis by articulating in their texts, plays, and videos the nature of woman as commodity in contemporary society. Through different uses of dramatic mimetic techniques they demonstrate that contemporary society is permeated with the concept of exchange. This concept of the female figure as item for exchange has been critically explored in such texts as Steinwachs's George Sand (1983), Wysocki's Abendlandleben (1987), and Export's performance piece Korperkonfgurationen (1973). This article will show how these texts expose contemporary society to criticism by means of mirroring its system. In fact, the work of the three artists presented here is located between two different traditions of dramatic mimesis, one that is based on the idea of disappearance through identification and one that is grounded in the idea of mimesis as the productive framework for women's language. In their Dialectic of Enlightenment Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno developed a theory of mimesis, and they located this theory at the intersection of myth and enlightenment. The Shaman's rites, they claim, were directed to wind and rain: the magician imitated demons, behaved frighteningly or made gestures of appeasement. Mimesis is, therefore, a strategy of impersonation in which the magician disappears through identification with another being. In the magic phase, dream images may be related to an object through similarity and name, not necessarily through representation. The connection between image and object is not one of intention but one of relationship (see Horkheimer/Adorno

Is Feminism Realism Possible? A theory of labial eros and mimesis

This article establishes a correlation between Aristotle's concept of mimesis and the two concepts of modern realism and linear narration, which, with good reason, have been attacked as phallic by many feminist theorists. The correlation is established on the basis of my analysis of the narrative structure of the play Oedipus Rex, and of the reasons why Aristotle might have chosen it as his main example to illustrate his theory in The Poetics. While Aristotle argued that drama is better than lyric and epic, he ironically chose a narrative play to represent his favourite genre to his male students at the Lyceum. This suggests that the example was the most suitable for them to understand. I argue that this accessibility is directly related to the student's gender, their heterosexual acculturation and their masculine embodiedness and eros. Nonetheless, Aristotle established a positive notion of mimesis, which is useful to feminists because it helps us to correlate the reality of our experience with the representations of it that we propose to each other and the external world. Hence, I propose that we use Aristotlelian mimesis as a point of departure to formulate a notion of mimesis based on female embodiedness and eros. A first example to which I point is that of labial mimesis, in which a female duo replaces the phallic hero at the center of the frame of representation. I argue that this duo represents the labia, thus pointing to the possibility of a feminist realism in which the relationship between experience and the intelligible is mediated by female embodiedness and eros, and of developing a new symbolic order based on these new mediations. As I intend to move feminist thought beyond formalist views of realism, I contend that phallic mimesis is only one of the many possible mimeses; not the most sophisticated, and definitely not universal. Indeed, The Poetics constructs it as universal because Aristotle's job was acculturating his students in a system that valorized phallic eros and expected them to become good citizens and procreators. Thus we see that in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, the hero stands erect at the center of the scene of representation and functions as the symbol of the linear, phallic mimesis which is particular but is presented as universal. Feminist readers can look for alternatives to this kind of mimesis, and we can focus on plays where a female duo is at the center of the dramatic structure, and their interaction is the focus of the play. I propose that this mimesis establishes a different relationship between experience and the intelligible for it is based on labial eros. It is a 'labial mimesis' that can be observed in many modern and contemporary films and plays that are realistic for they order experience in a clear, intelligible way, but do so through a mechanism that symbolizes a site of pleasure found in women's bodies. In this alternative to phallic mimesis, the mimetic function is accomplished by the labia, a symbol in which we women can recognize our own eros and interrelatedness.

Aristotle's Literary Aesthetics

AbstractAgainst the consensus that Aristotle in the Poetics sets out to give tragedy a role in exercising or improving the mature citizen's moral sensibilities, I argue that his aim is rather to analyse what makes a work of literature successful in its own terms, and in particular how a tragic drama can achieve the effect of suspense. The proper pleasure of tragedy is produced by the plotting and eventual dispelling of the play's suspense. Aristotle claims that poetry 'says what is universal' not in order to suggest that poetry achieves anything of the effect of philosophy, but to explain how in creating his plots the poet takes into consideration what, in general, could be expected to happen. Chapter 4 of the Poetics is not a theory of mimesis but an analysis of the lowest common denominator of the pleasure we take in fictions. The inevitability or likelihood by which events in the tragic plot are to be connected has an aesthetic rather than a moral function. Doing away with the irrationality of chance and increasing the human intelligibility of the action is not its point; the point is to furnish the plot with the second half of the formula for successful suspense: that events in the plot should happen 'against expectation because of one another'. The first half of the formula is examined under the rubric of peripety or reversal. The formula as a whole describes the pivotal moment when the pieces of the plot suddenly fit with a configuration that only in retrospect can we see to have been falling into place all along. Pity and fear are the emotions on which Aristotle focusses because they are the emotions engaged by the tightening-towards-release of literary suspense. And the pleasure of catharsis is the pleasure of that release.