A term you'll meet in literary theory and Aristotelian aesthetics.
Mimesis (μίμησις) is the Greek word for imitation or representation, and it has been at the center of debates about what literature does — and whether it does it well or badly — since Plato picked a fight with the poets in the fourth century BCE. The concept sounds simple: art imitates life. But the history of that "imitation" is where almost everything interesting in literary theory lives.
In The Republic, Plato argues that mimetic art — poetry, painting, drama — is three removes from truth. Reality as we perceive it is already a copy of the eternal Forms; art then imitates our perception; so art is a copy of a copy. Worse, it appeals to the emotional, irrational part of the soul, stirring pity and fear rather than reason. Plato's conclusion is notorious: the poets should be expelled from the ideal city (or at least given a garland and sent politely on their way).
This is not simply a crank position. Plato is making a serious epistemological claim: if knowledge requires access to unchanging truth, and art only gives us images of changing appearances, then art is fundamentally at odds with philosophy. The argument has had enormous influence, even among people who ultimately reject it.
Aristotle's Poetics is in part a response to Plato. For Aristotle, mimesis is not a defect but a virtue — the thing that makes art cognitively valuable. Three key moves:
A persistent misreading treats mimesis as straightforward copying: art should look like life, and the better it looks like life, the better the art. This is close to the nineteenth-century ideology of literary realism, but it is not what Aristotle meant. For Aristotle, mimesis involves selection, arrangement, and intensification. The plot of a tragedy is a mimesis of an action — but it is a plot, with a beginning, middle, and end, with probability and necessity governing the sequence. Real life has none of that. The imitation is of the form of action, not its random surface.
Erich Auerbach's magisterial Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946) traces this distinction across three thousand years, from Homer to Virginia Woolf. His opening chapter contrasts two styles of representing reality: Homer's fully externalized, luminous surface, where everything is visible and explained, versus the Hebrew Bible's fraught background, its silences and moral depths. Both are mimetic; they imitate reality in completely different ways. The question is not whether art copies life but how it selects and shapes what it represents.
In nineteenth-century literary criticism, mimesis became closely associated with realism — the ambition to represent social life accurately, with attention to class, economics, psychology, and the texture of daily existence. Balzac's Comédie humaine, Eliot's Middlemarch, Tolstoy's novels — these are mimetic in the sense that they try to show how life actually works, not how it appears in romance or melodrama.
But modernism complicated this. If consciousness is fragmented and subjective, then accurate mimesis requires stream of consciousness, unreliable narration, broken chronology — techniques that look "un-realistic" but are more faithful to mental life than conventional third-person narration. Joyce's Ulysses is highly mimetic in Aristotle's sense — it imitates the form of experience — while being completely non-realistic in the nineteenth-century sense.
Not all literature aims at mimesis. Allegory, fantasy, and metafiction deliberately call attention to the gap between representation and reality. The Russian Formalists, whose concept of defamiliarization is in some ways a theory of anti-mimesis, argued that art should not reproduce familiar reality but should make the familiar strange — interrupt automatic perception. On this view, the most powerful literature does the opposite of copying: it deranges ordinary perception to make you see again.
Still, even anti-mimetic art works in relation to mimesis — departing from it, ironizing it, or achieving a different kind of imitation at a higher level of abstraction. The question "what does this text represent, and how?" remains unavoidable.
Mimesis is the background assumption of most ordinary literary discussion. When we ask whether a character feels "real," whether a setting is "convincing," whether a story is "true to life" — we are making mimetic judgments. When we ask why a novel's distortions feel right, or why a realistic-seeming novel feels false, we are asking how mimesis works. The term gives you a handle on questions that otherwise get answered with vague impressionism. It asks you to specify: imitation of what, in what mode, with what degree of selection and transformation?
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