http://literaryexplorer.blondelibrarian.net/crit.html
Mimetic criticism emphasizes the correspondence of the work to external reality. In other words, reality is the context in which the work is studied. Mimetic criticism is committed to truth, reality, and the idea that literature, in some ways, imitates life. It is this idea that leads the mimetic critic to view the work as a true imitation, reflection, or representation of the world and human life.
http://wwww.ksu.edu.sa/colleges/art/eng/461-Eng/Literary%20Criticism%20Map.htm
Mimetic criticism seeks to see how well a work accords with the real world. Then, beyond the real world are approaches dealing with the spiritual and the symbolic–the images connecting people throughout time and cultures (archetypes). This is mimetic in a sense too, but the congruency looked for is not so much with the real world as with something beyond the real world–something tying in all the worlds/times/cultures inhabited by man.
http://asisaid.com/journal/article/1276.html
Mimetic criticism focuses on the text as that which portrays reality. There is a heavily Platonic sense to this critical school in at least some forms, given its sense that literature can illumine reality better than what we normally think of as “real life” can. The common analogy being Plato’s Cave: if our experience is the flickering shadows on the cave wall, literature is perhaps looking in the pond outside the cave and seeing the sun reflected with relative clarity.
For some reason, my fascination with Mimetic Criticism has been largely in applying its principles to a Jungian archetypal model. Though Jung’s ideas usually show up in Reader Response, it is my assertion that they fit perhaps better here, for my interest is in seeing how the author, reflecting on reality, creates the text, and not nearly as much on how the reader responds to the text. The archetypal figures do not just come out of the readers imagination to be imposed on the characters of the text, rather they exist in the text. Hamlet would not evoke archetypal inspired responses in readers if he did not fit the characteristics of the tragic hero to begin with. In a sense, to return to the New Criticism, we might say there is such a thing as an objective correlative — an objective feature of the text — which evokes the archetypal recognition in the reader.
Thinking about Auerbach reminds me of another point I find interesting with Mimeticism, however, and this one is more closely related to Biblical hermeneutics. While as a good Thomist (to the extent that Thomism does not impinge on my Barthian tendencies) I view too much emphasis on Plato to the exclusion of Aristotle as a bad thing indeed, I think the notion of the realm of the ideal forms is somewhat compatible with the Christian notion of God. If we follow Barth’s emphasis on the self-revelation of God and the fullness of revelation in Christ Jesus, then it may make sense to say that the Bible, as the clearest witness to that revelation, points from lesser to greater views of reality. Furthermore, natural revelation (such as it functions at all) fits well the analogy of the shadows on a cave: it gives a highly distorted view of the true reality. Nevertheless, even fallen creation reflects the original Word of God, by which it exists.
While we want to be careful to avoid Platonic dualism in the church, I think this perspective need not lead us to that point. We do not want to say we are trapped in a lesser physical revelation, but rather that the created world is in its entirety a witness to God that is lesser not because it is bad, but rather because it is not direct. The true self-revelation of God in Christ is a direct viewing of the Creator by creation rather than merely a view of reflections.
Obviously, there is a lot of potential applications in theology to the basic framework of Mimeticism — I am not by any means doing it justice. But it is at least worth mentioning on the “Attractions Next Exit” sign, so that you may get off and explore it more fully before we pass it up en route to the bigger and more recent stops on the itinerary.
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JasonPugh/019868.html
“In other words, critics operating within a system of thought can account for the function of literature and measure its truth in terms of a larger framework of ideas” (Keesey 210).
Mimetic criticisms appear could actually a relation to the three different forms of criticisms we have already looked at: Authorial Intent, Reader-Response, and Formalism. Think about this: although we do not have an author, there is a meaning that is being searched for that either the reader finds, or the author establishes, not because it is the want of the author for the reader, or himself, but really it is a want to seek the real truth. If it not a search for truth, then it is a showing of a truth or a piece of evidence of reality that has been found by the author to be shown to the audience.
There can be multiple interpretations of a mimetic criticism, but really, it is a literary mixed bag o’ goodies, but the only difference is the goal or task at hand. The primary focus of the mimetic criticism is to show that there is a piece of philosophical reality that is seen from the person who wrote the literature, and throught form and content, is showing the audience either the truth, or the harshness of the reality which they are apart of in their particular time period, or for generations afterward.
Overall, this is a very intense criticism that is going to take a lot of time to invest, because after all, everyone is searching for the overall truth in a piece of literature.
http://www.fortunecity.com/boozers/volunteer/254/Literary_Criticism.htm
Mimetic Criticism
High Mimetic:
A mode of literature in which, as in most epics and tragedies, the central characters are
above our own level of power and authority, though within the order of nature and subject
to social criticism.
Low Mimetic:
A mode of literature in which the characters exhibit a power of action which is roughly on
our own level, as in most comedy and realistic fiction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimesis#Literary_creation
Mimesis is thus thought by some to be a means of perceiving the emotions of the characters on stage or in the book; or the truth of the figures as they appear in sculpture or in painting; or the emotions as they are being configured in music, and of their being recognised by the onlooker as part of their human condition.
Mimesis as opposed to catharsis are two basic notions on which Freud relies to explain the psychological intricacy of the relation between the author and his work, the hero and the reader/spectator as the process of literary creation is akin to that of dreaming awake. Charles Mauron [4] starts from this fundamental theory to propose a structured method to analyse the unconscious roots and purpose of artistic creation. Identification and empathy are unconscious dynamic processes that account for the acting out of taboos. The creator and the reader/spectator symbolically identify and expurgate similar repressed desires, whether they be biographical or archetypal. Thus, when we read about Proust’s oral emotions reminding him of his aunt Leonie, we share a similar affect. The hero is but an avatar of the artist’s double
