Introduction
While rereading Caitlyn Fisher's These Waves of Girls I thought back to Susan Lanser's point that while "structuralist narratology has suppressed the representational aspects of fiction and emphasized the semiotic...feminist criticism has done the opposite." What does it mean then, if feminist criticism has expressed a desire to express? In other words what does mimesis mean now for feminist literary theory? When I say the word MIMESIS what thoughts tumble into your mind? Ideas of imitation, representation, re-presentation, verisimilitude, dramatic action, mimicking, re-creation, communication, or a Derridean doubling (there is no first writing and no first reading; every beginning is actually a doubling...always already a reference to something past). When I think about speaking or writing about mimesis I see a history wrought with challenges, scepticism, totality, but above all, I see a project (much like mimesis itself) which defies definition and completion. This is a paper about mimesis in contemporary hyperfictions, specifically in Caitlyn Fisher's These Waves of Girls. Its sets out to analyse the textual and visual representation of a women's attempt to name her desire directly. Writing about mimesis has, of course, been done many times before, not only by Plato and Aristotle but by a host of others. But something has always seemed to linger unsaid, or rather, should I say, unrepresented. It is this that necessitates more writing. Mimesis, like the main protagonist of These Waves of Girls, eludes final definition. The result, in both cases, is that the meaning of each is constantly becoming (to use Braidotti's terms) with such intensity that both the main character, Tracey, and the theory of mimesis call for a radical rethinking.
Reflections of Reality: Background of Mimesis
Mimesis, as Christopher Prendergast acknowledges, is one of the oldest, most fundamental concepts in Western aesthetics which has had a long and complex history and now suffers at the hands of "our postmodern condition." Although the concept of mimesis, or the representation of reality through art, has held an on-going interest for literary critics, philosophers and theorists, it has, as Prendergast put is, become eclipsed.
Why might mimesis be seen as a victim in contemporary literary theory? Within mimesis, it seems, certainly at the most general level, an equation has repeatedly been drawn between language and its objects that has the reassuring, comforting quality of the self-evident. It has been founded on the common-sense presumption that the imitation or representation must have an original. The acute authority of this equation and its apparent transparency has made the mimetic approach to literary analysis and criticism very appealing for its certainties: mimesis depends on a notion of what the world already is.
