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Sitaram
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Joined: 14 Sep 2005
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 Posted: Tue Jun 13, 2006 2:16 pm Post subject: Mimetic and Non Memetic Literature |
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http://www.literatureforums.net/vb3/showthread.php?t=5574
"PennyLane" was one of my favorite songs from the Beatles.
I would like to attempt to help you with this intersting question, but I need
to clarify for myself what is meant by mimesis in fiction.
Did your instructor give you any notes or definitions regarding the terms
mimetic and non-mimetic? I realize that mimesis carries the fundamental
notion of imitation, but that is too vague, since all art is in a sense mimetic
of reality, even cinematographic art.
When questions, assignments and terminology become more confused
and obscure and challenging than the answers and solutions, then
academia is in trouble.
Of course, I am only assuming that you are a student and that you are
seeking help with an assignment. Am I correct?
I have spent a lot of time on various literature forums, and I often see
such requests for help. I also often see replies posted which basically
scold the student for things like not reading the book, not starting soon
enough on the assignment, and other various negative things. If I ruled
the world, or a message board, I would outlaw such negative posts, for
the simple reason that anyone can be critical and scold a young person,
and even the guilty party knows full well the virtues of study and the
sinful wages of laziness and procrastination. So, if you feel such negative
things about a student's request yourself, then you are wasting band
width to scold and mock, since you will basically be posting the same tired
old smug song and dance.
On the other hand, if you take every student's question as a challenge to
yourself, then often you shall learn something new, as I am today
regarding the definition of mimetic and non-mimetic. You shall be
encouraging the student to become more active in the forum, rather than
chasing them away. They may actually befriend you, and then you shall
find gentle ways to guide and encourage them. I thought I would be so
bold to express my viewpoint on this issue, which I have never expressed
elsewhere, and to express it before anyone posts some scolding rebuke,
so it would not appear that I post in retaliation or a spirit of ad hominem.
And now let us turn to the question at hand.
http://www.brocku.ca/english/jlye/uses.html
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Literature is "mimetic," that is to say, re-presents 'reality', 'nature', or 'the
way things are'. It portrays moral and other experiences in a compelling,
concrete, immediately felt way through its aesthetic devices and powers,
yet allows as well for reflection, for a theorizing or reconsideration of the
experiences evoked, as we are both 'experiencing' the world evoked and
are separated from it. It is important to understand, under this thesis, a
couple of aspects of literature and representation:
1. human experience is affective and symbolic; literature, which uses
affect and symbol, can represent it as we genuinely experience and
imagine it.
2. literature works through the senses both immediately (in its sounds
and rhythms) and symbolically (as words conjure up images, associations
and so forth) -- there is a concrete as well as a symbolic presence.
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A google search reveals for me:
| Quote: |
http://www.answers.com/topic/mimesis
Aristotle's most well known work on this subject is his Poetics.
Walter Kaufmann in Tragedy and Philosophy Ch.II suggests that we
translate mimêsis in Aristotle’s Poetics as “make-believe”.
Michael Davis, a translator and commentator of Aristotle writes:
"At first glance, mimêsis seems to be a stylizing of reality in which the
ordinary features of our world are brought into focus by a certain
exaggeration, the relationship of the imitation to the object it imitates
being something like the relationship of dancing to walking. Imitation
always involves selecting something from the continuum of experience,
thus giving boundaries to what really has no beginning or end. Mimêsis
involves a framing of reality that announces that what is contained within
the f-r-a-m-e is not simply real. Thus the more “real” the imitation the
more fraudulent it becomes." (The Poetry of Philosophy p.3)
More recently Erich Auerbach, Merlin Donald, and René Girard have
written about mimesis.
Mimesis in contrast to diegesis
It was also Plato and Aristotle who contrasted mimesis with diegesis. In
diegesis it is not the form in which a work of art represents reality but that
in which the author is the speaker who is describing events in the
narrative he presents to the audience.
It is in diegesis that the author addresses the audience or the readership
directly to express his freely creative art of the imagination, of fantasies
and dreams in contrast to mimesis. Diegesis was thought of as telling, the
author narrating action indirectly and describing what is in the character's
mind and emotions, while mimesis is seen in terms of showing what is
going on in characters' inner thoughts and emotions through his external
actions.
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This next link is a very good read, from the perspective of
postmodernists:
http://www.chicagoschoolmediatheory.net/glossary2004/mimesis.htm
I suspect that Aristotle's definition of mimesis is quite different from
Derrida's definition:
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Derrida uses the concept of mimesis in relation to texts - which are
non-disposable doubles that always stand in relation to what has preceded
them. Texts are deemed "nondisposable" and "double" in that they
always refer to something that has preceded them and are thus "never
the origin, never inner, never outer, but always doubled" [25]. The
mimetic text (which always begins as a double) lacks an original model
and its inherent intertextuality demands deconstruction." Differénce is the
principle of mimesis, a productive freedom, not the elimination of
ambiguity; mimesis contributes to the profusion of images, words,
thoughts, theories, and action, without itself becoming tangible" [26].
Mimesis thus resists theory and constructs a world of illusion,
appearances, aesthetics, and images in which existing worlds are
appropriated, changed, and re-interpreted. Images are a part of our
material existence, but also mimetically bind our experience of reality to
subjectivity and connote a "sensuous experience that is beyond reference
to reality" [27].
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This Wikepedia article is the first one that seems to get into some
concrete examples from literature:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomy_of_Criticism
| Quote: |
Tragedy is concerned with the hero's separation from society. Myth deals
with the death of gods. Romance gives elegies mourning the death of
heroes such as Arthur or Beowulf. Classic tragedy of the high mimetic
epoch presents the death of a noble human such as Othello or Oedipus.
Low mimetic tragedy shows the death or sacrifice of a common human
and evokes pathos as with Hardy's Tess or Daisy Miller. The ironic mode
shows the death or suffering of a protagonist who is both weak and pitiful
compared to the rest of humanity and the protagonist's environment;
Kafka's works provide many examples. |
Here is a course description which includes examples of "non-mimetic
narrative"
http://www.emu.edu.tr/english/aca...raturehuman/coursedescription.htm
| Quote: |
ENG 254 Studies in Non-Mimetic Narrative
Students will be introduced to parabolic narrative modes which have been
developed as a means of metaphysical interrogation to satisfy the need to
testify to the mystery of identity, to the soul's plight in its passage
through the material realm, and to the possibilities of its returning to true
origins healed, and redeemed. Parables-both traditional -Christian,
Hasidic, Sufi and Taoist, and literary -Dante, Hawthorne, Kafka, Dinesen,
Daumal's Mt. Analogue, will be sampled as a stimulus for inquiry into the
diverse and antithetical reasons why people tell stories of such devilish
ambiguity. Metafictions by Borges will be compared to traditional
Indo-European stories compiled by Zimmer in The King and the Corpse to
demonstrate how the processes of speculative thought impose narrow
and arbitrary conceptual vocabularies on the mysteries of being
non-being. Using the Eros and Psyche story as prototype, classic instances
of the Anglo-German literary fairy tale will be analyzed for the way they
instruct as to the proper and improper stances that can be taken in
relation to those mysteries -Novalis, Hoffmann, George MacDonald.
Consideration will be given to how and to what purpose horror, anxiety
-Poe, Lovecraft, Gilman, Meyrink's The Golem, Tutuola's My Life in the
Bush of Ghosts, Hedayat's The Blind Owl, and the sublime transformsinto
awe -excerpts from The Quest of the Holy Grail, Dante's Paradiso,
Melville's Moby Dick, Lem's Solaris. Certain Gnostic variations on the
Judeo-Christian Genesis myth which have persistently emerged from the
esoteric "underground" of Western culture will be studied in Blake's The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell and The Book of Urizen, Lindsay's Voyage to
Arcturus, Lautreamont's phantasmagoria Maldoror. The Christian New
Testament- "Book of Revelations" and Angela Carfes The Passion of New
Eve will illustrate apocalyptic vision. Finally, students will be introduced to
the narrative capacity of a non-verbal artifact: the Tarot deck. This will be
in preparation for comparing and contrasting works by Calvino -The
Castle of Crossed Destinies, and Charles Williams -The Greater Trumps,
which exploit Tarot symbolism for very different metaphysical purpose.
Films in the metaphysical mode will also be screened, selected from the
work of film makers such as Carl Dreyer and the German Expressionists,
Cocteau, Bunuel, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Wenders.
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Certain authors seem to equate the term non-mimetic with the fantastic or
surreal. A paragraph describing sipping tea in a restaurant would then be
mimetic, whereas sipping tea from ten gallon vessels, with martians, while
clocks melt from the wall, would be non-mimetic.
Off the top of my head, I would say that everything by Hemingway is
totally mimetic, in the sense that he depicts ordinary people in everyday
scenes, whereas someone like Pynchon, in his Gravity's Rainbow
hardly resembles reality, and frequently becomes quite surrealistic or
fantastic.
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