Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes (Critical Studies in the Humanities)

295 Pages·2005·3.76 MB·English

by  John D. Lyons

Mimesis
From Mirror to Method,
Augustine to Descartes
Critical Studies in the Humanities
Victor E. Taylor, Series Editor
This open-ended series provides a unique publishing venue by com-
bining single volumes issuing from landmark scholarship with ped-
agogy-related interdisciplinary collections of readings. This principle
of cross-publishing, placing scholarship and pedagogy side by side
within a single series, creates a wider horizon for specialized research
and more general intellectual discovery. In the broad field of the hu-
manities, the Critical Studies in the Humanities Series is committed
to preserving key monographs, encouraging new perspectives, and
developing important connections to pedagogical issues.
Proposals for submission should go to the Series Editor, Victor E. Taylor,
Department of English and Humanities, York College of Pennsylvania,
York, PA 17405-7199.
Sander L. Gilman, Nietzschean Parody: An Introduction to Reading
Nietzsche
Sharyn Clough, Ed., Siblings Under the Skin: Feminism, Social
Justice and Analytic Philosophy
Dominick LaCapra, Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Philosopher
Gregg Lambert, Report to the Academy (re: the NEW conflict of
the faculties)
John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr., Eds., Mimesis: From
Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes
Michael Strysick, Ed., The Politics of Community
Dennis Weiss, Ed., Interpreting Man
Mimesis
From Mirror to Method,
Augustine to Descartes
John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr.,
Editors
A volume in the series
Critical Studies in the Humanities
General Editor, Victor E. Taylor
Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes. Copyright © 1982,
2004, John D. Lyons and Stephen D. Nichols, Jr.
All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced,
stored in an information retrieval system, or transcribed, in any form or by
any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise
— without the express written permission of the publisher, and the holder of
copyright. Submit all inquiries and requests to
The Davies Group, Publishers
PO Box 440140
Aurora, Colorado, 80044-0140
USA.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mimesis : from mirror to method, Augustine to Descartes / John D. Lyons
and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr., editors.
p. cm. -- (Critical studies in the humanities)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-888570-68-7 (alk. paper)
1. Mimesis in literature. 2. European literature--Renaissance,
1450-1600--History and criticism. I. Lyons, John D., 1946- II. Nichols,
Stephen G. III. Series.
PN56.M536M553 2004
809’.912--dc22
2003024716
Printed in the United States of America
Published 2003.
The Davies Group Publishers, Aurora CO 80044-0140
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
Contents
Retrospective Preface ix
Introduction 1
Eugene Vance 19
Saint Augustine: Language as Temporality
Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. 35
Romanesque Imitation or Imitating the Romans?
Kevin Brownlee 55
Reflections in the Miroër aus Amoreus: The Inscribed
Reader in Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose
Marina Scordilis Brownlee 67
Autobiography as Self-(Re)presentation: The
Augustinian Paradigm and Juan Ruiz’s Theory of Reading
Robert Hollander 79
Imitative Distance: Boccaccio and Dante
Nancy J. Vickers 95
The Body Re-membered: Petrarchan Lyric and the
Strategies of Description
Murray Krieger 105
Presentation and Representation in the Renaissance
Lyric: The Net of Words and the Escape of the Gods
Thomas M. Greene 127
Erasmus’s “Festina lente”: Vulnerabilities of the
Humanist Text
Terence Cave 143
The Mimesis of Reading in the Renaissance
John D. Lyons 159
Speaking in Pictures, Speaking of Pictures: Problems
of Representation in the Seventeenth Century
Michel Beaujour 181
Speculum, Method, and Self-Portrayal: Some
Epistemological Problems
Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce 191
Novelas ejemplares: Reality, Realism,
Literary Tradition
Timothy J. Reiss 209
Power, Poetry, and the Resemblance of Nature
Contributors 241
Notes 245
Index 275
From the Series Editor
Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes is a critical
collection focusing on the intersections of art, history, literature,
philosophy, and theory. It is this fifth term, “theory,” that marks the
volume’s significance during the early 1980s—a time of heightened
conflict over the newly emerging role of “theory” in the humanities.
As Stephen G. Nichols notes in his new preface, “[s]ince so much
poststructuralist thought has focused on representation, it was natu-
ral, if not inevitable, for scholars involved in the project to turn to
mimesis, representation as imitation, for a concept that bridged the
historical and the contemporary.” This, of course, has not been the
first time that mimesis has played a key role in “bridging” an intel-
lectual divide. The onto-theological dimension of medieval thought
brings together the Judeo-Christian Creator and the Platonic-Aristo-
telian metaphysics of Being as just one instance of the importance of
mimesis in conjoining philosophical divisions. From Eugene Vance’s
exploration of Augustine’s metaphysics to Timothy J. Reiss’s discus-
sion of representation and modern political theory, Mimesis offers
a truly interdisciplinary and wide-ranging historical inquiry into
a foundational concept in the arts, literature, and philosophy. First
published in an era in which “theory” was portrayed as the antith-
esis of humanistic study, this collection provides a necessary account
of a new synthesis of the humanities and theoretical inquiry. With
the persisting tensions within the humanities now over the future of
theory, Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes recap-
tures a critical element in this long debate, providing a sophisticated
analysis of mimesis and demonstrating a unique theoretical method
of scholarship.
Victor E. Taylor
York, Pennsylvania
February, 2004

Retrospective Preface
This book was conceived in 1980 for a precise purpose: to demon-
strate not only the viability, but also the necessity of combining new
theoretical paradigms with medieval and early modern studies. In
the face of a then prevalent fashion for theoretical methods that ig-
nored, when they did not openly denigrate, historical contexts and
earlier literary traditions, many scholars, some very prominent, sim-
ply rejected “theory” outright.
The scholars represented here did not believe that the theo-
retical methodology so decried by some of their early modern col-
leagues was innately inimical to their materials. On the contrary,
medieval and early modern literature, they felt, offered a challenge
for exploring, and even extending, the viability of new theoretical
paradigms; but only on condition that the enterprise respect the
context of each part of the equation. Simply “applying” new para-
digms as a crude hermeneutic tool would treat medieval and early
modern texts as though they were contemporaneous with the meth-
ods used to interpret them.
By ignoring the sophisticated philosophical currents determin-
ing the nature of the historical context that produced a given work,
even the most ingenious theoretical interpretations would fail to
connect the mind that conceived the text with its world, thereby
failing to understand the nature of the representation produced.
What the historical work had to say of interest to the contemporary
period—how, for example, it might interrogate or confirm the in-
sights opened by new intellectual paradigms—would also be lost.
The challenge lay in finding a means for connecting the mind and
the world, not only for the historical material, but also for the con-
temporary scene.
Since so much poststructuralist thought has focused on repre-
sentation, it was natural, if not inevitable, for the scholars involved
in the project to turn to mimesis, representation as imitation, for a
x Mimesis: From Mirror to Method Preface xi
concept that bridged the historical and the contemporary. The choice
obviously honored Erich Auerbach’s magical and magisterial Mime-
sis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,1 but also sought
to highlight new dimensions of mimetic theory that had developed,
thanks in large measure to the influence of his work, since its origi-
nal German publication in 1948. In particular, we wanted to note
the movement away from traditional mimetic theory that stressed
objectivity as its prime function in favor of a performative mode less
concerned with or constrained by the imitation of external reality,
strictly conceived.
In hindsight, both the project and the choice of mimesis seem
prescient. Auerbach, for instance, has been linked with Plato, the two
seen as particularly responsible in antiquity and in the twentieth
century for shaping the thinking in which mimesis plays such an
important part.2 Then, too, a growing number of books and articles
in the last decade or so have explored the importance of his thought.3
Mimesis itself, on the other hand, has become something of a growth
industry in the wake of the “historical turn” that replaced the fashion
for pure theory beginning in the mid-1980s.4
In this vein, Poetics Today published a special issue on the topic in
1999 that demonstrates nodes of contact with aspects of poststructur-
alist thought. This trend is the more intriguing in so far as such theo-
rists—e.g., Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, de Man, and
others—have been perceived as rejecting “a conventional aesthetic
privileging mimesis or what is taken to be its synonym, imitation,”
on the grounds of its being “an ideologically suspect recirculation
of the readymade, a false belief in the fixity of meaning and the pos-
sibility of achieving full presence, a language game that fails to see
itself as such.”5
As Martin Jay points out, however, such stereotyping ignores
the fact that since antiquity mimesis has been suspect for precisely
the opposite reasons. Plato attacks mimesis as relativistic and con-
tingent, a pernicious mode whose danger lies in the undermining
of stable truth.6 Indeed, in retrospect, the performative dimension of
mimesis, so crucial to the studies in our volume, turns out to have
played a major role in revealing the mimetic component in the work
of Adorno, Benjamin, Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthes, and others.7