ABSTRACT
Mimesis is among the oldest terms in literary and artistic theory, and it is certainly among the most fundamental. It so defines our way of thinking about art, literature and representation more generally that we rely on the concept even if we have never heard of it or do not know its history. Most often (but inadequately) translated from the Greek as ‘imitation’, mimesis describes the relationship between artistic images and reality: art is a copy of the real. But this definition hardly accounts for the scope and significance of the idea. Mimesis describes things, such as artworks, as well as actions, such as imitating another person. Mimesis can be said to imitate a dizzying array of originals: nature, truth, beauty, mannerisms, actions, situations, examples, ideas. The word has been used to describe the imitative relationship between art and life, as well as the relationship between a master and a disciple, an artwork and its audience, and the material world and a rational order of ideas. Mimesis takes on different guises in different historical contexts, masquerading under a variety of related terms and translations: emulation, mimicry, dissimulation, doubling, theatricality, realism, identification, correspondence, depiction, verisimilitude, resemblance. No one translation, and no one interpretation, is sufficient to encompass its complexity and
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the tradition of commentary it has inspired. Nor can any one translation account for the range of attitudes mimesis evokes. Mimesis is always double, at once good and bad, natural and unnatural, necessary and dispensable. It is the sincerest form of flattery as well as the trade of pirates and plagiarists, the signal behaviour of great artists as well as apes, parrots and children.
