Mimesis

Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Point of Departure
On Auerbach's History of Mimesis
Worldmaking and Social Pressure
Literary and Social Mimesis

Part I. Mimesis as Imitation, the Production
of Appearances, and Fiction
2. On the Origins of the Concept
3. Imitation, Illusion, Image (Plato)
Similarity, Imitation, Education
Appearance and lllusion
Images as Appearances with the Character
of Similarity
4. The Break in the History of Mimesis:
The Use of Writing
Oral Poetry
Between Oral and Literate Culture
5. Poetic Mimesis (Aristotle)

Part II. Mimesis as lmitatio, the Expression of Power,
and Literate Subjectivity
6. Mimesis as lmitatio
7. Poetics and Power in the Renaissance
8. lntertextuality, Fragmentation, Desire:
Erasmus, Montaigne, Shakespeare

Part III. Mimesis as Enactment of the State
9. The Conflict Over History: The Querelle des Anciens
et des Modernes
On the History of the Conflict
Racine and Moliere
Structural Results
10. Mimesis as the Self-Representation of Political Power
The Portrait of the King
On the Dramatic Practice of French Classicism
The Representation of Daily Life in Comedy
11. Against Mimesis as Self-Representation
The Critique of Self-Representation in Madame
de Lafayette
Negative Anthropology
Two Attempts to Transcend Mimesis

Part IV. From Imitation to the Constitution
of the Creative Subject
12. Problems in the Imitation of Nature
in the Eighteenth Century
13. Mimesis in the Theater of the Enlightenment
14. Diderot's Paradox of Acting
15. The Transformation of Mimesis in Lessing
Lessing's Argument
16. Self-Mimesis (Rousseau)
Self-Formation
Pedagogy and Seduction

Part V. Mimesis as the Principle of Worldmaking
in the Novel and Society
17. The Mimetic Constitution of Social Reality
Images of a Society
Balzac's Illusions perdues 225
18. "Mimetic Desire" in the Work of Girard
19. Violence in Antiromantic Literature
The Authorial I and Others
The Relationships of I and Other in the Novel
Language, Violence, and the Internal Perspective
20. The Mimesis of Violence (Girard)

Part VI. Mimesis as Entree to the World, Language,
and Writing
21. Nonsensuous Similarity: On the
Linguistic Anthropology of Benjamin
22. Vital Experience (Adorno)
23. The Between-Character of Mimesis (Derrida)

Results

Historical Positions of Mimesis
The Dimensions of Mimesis

Notes
Bibliography
Index