ASSIGNMENT

MIMESIS

SUBMITTED TO:                                                        SUBMITTED BY:

Dr. SHALINI                                                               MUHD UVAIS  PA

Central University of Kerala                                       I ECL

                                   

   Submitted on: 7/9/2015

NO	CONTENT	PAGE
1	INTRODUCTION	3
2	CONTENT	5
3	CONCLUSION	9
4	BIBLIOGRAPHY	10

INTRODUCTION

            Mimesis is translated from the Greek as imitation. Having a wide range of meaning, it includes imitation, representation, mimicry, receptivity and to name a few. It helps us to define the relationship between art and reality. Plato came to contrast it with the narrative while the term happened to be described in many ways, especially in literary areas. Erich Auerbach’s famous work  Mimesis:The Representation of Reality in Western Literature said to have define ‘mimesis’ as a form of ‘realism’ in literature. T W Adorno,  a critical theorist from the Frankfurt school, says it as a central philosophical term which is like a way in which the form of ‘reason’ in the works get understood. In literary criticism, it is used:                                                    

1)  define the nature of literature,                                                                                                       

2) study the relationship between two texts. 

The discussion of the mimesis goes through Plato, Aristotle, Philip Sidney, Samual Taylor Colridge and so on.

            Since the Fifteenth century, the term mimesis was a major matter-of-fact in the discussion of the nature of poetry. Their studies reported to have visited through strict realism and remote idealism. Unfortunately, by early Nineteenth century, with the arrival of expressive criticism mimesis lost its central position. But last half century, the critics like R S Crane and Chicago critics revived its place with the help of Aristotle’s Poetics. At the other hand, Marxist critics come to propose the literature as ‘reflection’ which means an imitation of social realities and truths. Meanwhile, Greek and Roman rhetoricians proclame that every poet should imitate classical models, namely, mere copying is not enough but ‘must imitate the form and the spirit’. In another sense, ‘imitation’ indicates a work’s inner influence of another old work which is adapted to writer’s age. Imitation of Horace by Alexander Pope even wording Horace’s Roman satires.Finally, mimesis is largely discussed and interchangeably used term which helped us to define the works of art.

            As many studies go on, somany writers and critics arrived to opine about the presence and influence of mimetic activity throughout the text. Concerning any work of art, the imitation is something very decisive and inevitable, namely, art is made of imitation. Because art is a copy of a life, then, life itself is an imitation of life. Starting with Plato and Aristotle, the term mimesis deserves a vast level of interpretation and analysis in which any work of art could be defined and explained with the complete sense. As far as the life and the  literature are concerned, the matter is how it is followed and experienced by many until now. So far, the modern study of each and every  notion of literary studies come to be reported that it approaches many texts through many ways. Because the reading of texts in these days is very complex and vast on because of many literal and critical approaches. 

                                                                        Content

Plato, Aristotle and mimesis.

According to Stephen Conway, Plato and Aristotle started critical observation about value of art in human society. While Plato tried mostly degrade it, Aristotle came to enquire any way to determine the merit work of art. More interestingly, both of their approaches are only on one notion that is mimesis, imitation. Through this, two of them are more concerned about the artist ability to have significant impact on others. The theory of mimesis made disdain in Plato’s mind and a curiosity in Aristotle’s mind. What makes it so is their observation of reality, truth and real knowledge. In the sense, the do not disagree in the matter of mimesis but is in the very term of reality. For Plato, it is idea, there is less importance to abstract things, because it is twice removed from reality. So, human artistic approaches based on this appearances are highly suspectable. It is basically “ an indistinct expression of truth” (Republic X,22).

At the other hand, Aristotle sees it through a different way. In the Poetics, Aristotle tried to articulate method of enquiry like, tragedy attempts to imitate the complex world of human actions, because every person “ learnes his lessons through imitation and we observe that all men find pleasure in imitation”, that is imitation is purely a constructive way of processing reality.

“The artist is a maker, selecting certain details, excluding others, giving a work it’s particular shape, not a deceitful scribe”

At last, we conclude that art is not either truth or false but it is really a challenge to reality. “The process of imitation is used in both cases to promote the particular version of reality espoused by each man”. While such study is beneficial in tracing the philosophical conflict regarding the usage and importance of imitation in art, what is most apparent, perhaps, is the discovery that language itself is an imperfect imitation of meaning, capable of fostering such conflicts.

French philosopher Jacques Derrida has written : “ the whole history of the interpretation of the art of letters has moved and been transformed within the diverse logical possibilities opened up by the concept of imitation”. Without knowing mimesis, no one can understand western artistic theories, rather as fact of nature.

For Matthew Potolsky, mimesis is something more than a theory of art and images. Now a days, mimesis is a research topic in Psychology, Anthropology, educational theory, feminism, post colonial studies, political theory , Neo Darwinism and biological speculation. We know that, art is not something like rituals, laws, social structures which those are limited in some way. But it speakes to a “ transcendent human nature”, namely, art has it’s own irresistible effects on it’s audience, like Werther effect in Psychology.

Through the theories of Stephen Halliwell,  a question arises is whether mimesis has it’s base in nature and objective reality or in culture and custom. Based on first idea mimesis gives much importance to what is reality and the material world. But the second idea tells that mimesis is does not need to reflect what is the reality, it has to represent a model of it. If the first idea is true, the art is like a mirror turned to the world, if it is second, then art is like a mirror implicitly turned to the spectactors and his or her beliefs. So, we can’t think about mimesis without concerning human psychology and culture. While art reproduce something, it describes an objective reality, a convention. Fidelity to convention, not to nature is the source of mimesis. Finally, following a convention is actually a kind of imitation.

Modern attitudes towars the mimesis

          Mimeis has become a monolithic  term. An article from The Dictionary of  the History of Ideas says that, “ the idea of imitation having been thoroughly discussed and analysed , nothing much was left to be done”. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century aesthetics shares that mimesis is bound to the imitation of nature. For  Lessing and  Rousseau there is a turn from Aristotlian concept  and  “ move  towards an assertion of  individual creativity in which the productive  relationship  of   one mimetic world to another is renounced”.

            Authors like Benjamin, Girard and Derrida too say that mimesis has a way of  relating  to social practice  and  interpersonal  relation   rather than  a  mere  copying. In Michael Taussiy’s discussion  mimesis  is  reported  as  an  adaptive  behavior that allows  human  to  recreate the  model of his environment. By examining Adorno, we conclude that  the  manner   in   which   mimesis is viewed as  a  correlative  behaviour in which  a  subject actively engages in “ making oneself similer to an another” dissociates mimesis from it’s definition  as  merely  imitation.

            Through  Dialectic  of  Enlightenment  Adorno and Horkheimer argue that  “ in western history mimesis has been transformed by  Enlightenment science from a dominant presence into a distorted , repressed and hidden force. Mimesis thus resists the theory  and  constructs  a  world  of  illusion,  appearances, aesthetics   and  images  in which existing  worlds  are  appropriated, changed and  reinterpreted.

            However, we can’t avoid the term mimesis even now because :

1)        It is strongly interwoven into western philosophy and aesthetics that any return to history of ideas requires grappling with the many meaning that mimesis has carried within it.

2)        It’s terminology has long been associated with the fundamental human phinomena like mimicry and etc..

Mimesis also functions as a key concept in literary criticism, like Erich Aurebach, Paul Ricouer’s  Time and Narrative takes Aristotle’s Poetics to it’s departure-point  devides  mimesis into a tripartic model of narrative  emploletment. Literary theorist Rene Girard uses the term “ mimetic desire”  to  describe  a  subject’s  unconscious adoption  of   another’s  desire  for  an  object. Feminist  philosopher, Luce  Irigrary  encourages  women  to  play  with  mimesis  and  post  colonial  theorist  Homi  Bhaba  interprets colonial  subject’s  mimicry  of    the  colonizer as an ambivalent and menanacing form of imitation.

             Recent books of  Nick Cheter and  Susan Harley’s  Perspectives on  Imitation:  from  Neuroscience to  Social Science (2005 )  looks at imitation as a brain activity, like a mode of learning in childrens,  a  mechanism of behavioural contagion  and  a  driver  of  cultural  evolution. While Arnold Whittick comes to discuss about the term  mimesis , he argues that at one time, painting , sculpture and poetry were considered as the imitative arts and  music  and  architecture  were  non-imitative  arts. Leon Golden in recent article opines that  Plato concerns  mimesis as  means  in it’s  various  forms  in  the  search  of  ultimate reality. 

conclusion

The term mimesis is derived from the Greek mimesis,  to imitate . The OED defines mimesis as "a figure of speech, whereby the words or actions of other are imitated" and "the deliberate imitation of the behavior of one group of people by another as a factor in social change" . Mimicry is defined as "the action, practice, or art of mimicking or closely imitating ... the manner, gesture, speech, or mode of actions and persons, or the superficial characteristics of a thing" . Both terms are generally used to denote the imitation or representation of nature, especially in aesthetics (primarily literary and artistic media). Within Western traditions of aesthetic thought, the concepts of imitation and mimesis have been central to attempts to theorize the essence of artistic expression, the characteristics that distinguish works of art from other phenomena, and the myriad of ways in which we experience and respond to works of art. In most cases, mimesis is defined as having two primary meanings - that of imitation (more specifically, the imitation of nature as object, phenomena, or process) and that of artistic representation. Mimesis is an extremely broad and theoretically elusive term that encompasses a range of possibilities for how the self-sufficient and symbolically generated world created by people can relate to any given "real", fundamental, exemplary, or significant world . Mimesis is integral to the relationship between art and nature, and to the relation governing works of art themselves. Michael Taussig describes the mimetic faculty as "the nature that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other. The wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and that power.

To sum up, the term mimesis is widely discussed term because it defines the relationship between the art and the life. Meanwhile, there a crusial debate between the mimesis and digesis in many ways. Like that there would be more and more topic to study with the very term mimesis. Starting with Plato, the literal and critical approaches of mimesis open a vast level of areas to discuss infront of the readers.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester:

             Manchester UP, 1995. Print.

                     

Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York, NY: Norton,2001.

            Print.

Abraham, M H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Wadsworth:Canada,2012