Table of Contents

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

About the Author

Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf are Professors in the Center for Historical Anthropology at the Free University of Berlin and the authors of several works of literary and cultural criticism. Don Reneau is a translator and writer in Berkeley, California.