Mimésis

History

The term applies first of all in a religious context to the Danse, MIME and the Musique. It is not a question to reproduce the appearance of reality but to express hidden reality of it. Later, it indicates on the contrary the imitation of reality, thus for Démocrite the imitation of nature by the technique (weaving which imitates that of the spider). The term is then used by Socrate in connection with the visual arts which copy nature.

The literary mimesis

Design of Aristote

The concept is discussed by Plato in the Republic but especially by Aristote in Poetic the . Aristote distinguishes two types of mimesis : the simple imitation of nature and the stylization of this one. Aristote also proposes three ways of imitating: as the things are, like one says them and as they should be.

Analysis of Paul Ricoeur

Paul Ricœur, philosophizes French, made a critic of the structuralism which he saw like a basic structure whereas for him, the account is in perpetual evolution and thus he proposes Mimesis, they are three:

Mimesis I: Préconfiguration (it is time lived, prénarratif)
Mimesis II: Configuration (it is the time of the account, the time of the setting in intrigue)
Mimesis III: Reconfiguration (it is the time of the rebuilding)

These Mimesis are cyclic, they form mimetic loops.

The mimèsis in the Social sciences

The mimésis term indicates a pallet of behaviors which bear different names in the multiple social sciences (imitation, identification, Intussusception, etc).

It is about all that is about the " to make comme".

Mimesis and Psychoanalysis

The concepts of mimesis and Catharsis are taken again by Freud to clarify one day new the principle of artistic creation: comparable with the unconscious process which the daydream concerns. It does not act any more, of course, of therapeutic but literary analysis. Charles Mauron share of this fundamental data to structure its critical method and to explore the biographical gasoline, (individual, and archetypic) of the relation between the author and his work. In parallel, the psychocritique one quite naturally explains the empathy of the reader/spectator. The major difference between the symptom Névrotique and artistic creation lies in the sublimation.

The " author; puts in scène" , dramatizes Pulsion S, unconscious phantasms and satisfies them symbolically. The situations which it reproduces unconsciously are the objectivation at the same time as the expurgation (acting out) of a traumatic past. Beyond the lived personal one which often goes back to any early childhood, they are often common diagrams, Archétypes which are represented (the that): the reader spectator there " reconnaît" , realizes and expurge in its turn a desire Tabou. Thus not is not need to have soaked oneself a madeleine in lime to be taken in the wave of the feeling proustienne! While at the same time Proust finds a taste of the past, its reader finds aunt Léonie and a " émotion" oral and is identified with the character; even if it is fictitious, this character becomes a Avatar of sound Me.

Imitation and training

Marcel Jousse observes that the child does not imitate only the human ones but " tout". For example, to include/understand what is a chair it imitates the chair.

Mimésis and construction of the identity

The man needs an existential model which he imitates. This model can be a character of legend (Amadis of Gaules for Don Quichotte, heroins of novel for Emma Bovary).

It can be a close character (Rene Girard names it “internal mediator”).

Identity and violence

Mythology is full with stories of twins who have the same object of desire (territory, woman, etc). Shakespeare describes two gentlemen who will not delay with entretuer: “they are like brothers”. To be “even”, to be in a dynamics of same is at the origin of the fratricidal combat.

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