(Re)presenting Mimesis – sisemiM gnitneserp(eR)
Continuing the quest for subjectivity Monica Fludernik, in Towards a Natural Narratology, argues for a redefinition of narrativity which stresses the significance of experientiality. She believes that there can be "narratives without plot but there cannot be any narratives without a human (anthropomorphic) experiencer of some sort at some narrative level." Susan Lanser and Joan Radner announce that "the signs common to women's experience can make up a complex text capable of many readings." They continue by explaining that often subjugated groups such as women voice "ideas, beliefs, experiences, feelings and attitudes" covertly because "the dominant culture...would find [the ideas] disturbing or threatening if expressed in more overt forms."
Françoise Meltzer similarly attaches great importance to experience and sees it as the "crux of mimesis." Her work traces the textual portrait, "at once the mimetic gesture of writing (writing seeking to control the eidetic other, to reduce it to its own terms), and the moment when otherness--because it is contextualized in a place where, like Auerbach, it is homeless--grants us a better perspective on the "home of literature." The problem of representation in literature allows her to develop, on the one hand, a historical perspective of how the text re-presents the world, and on the other hand, a specular dimension, how the text "also re-presents itself." What is important here is the notion of didactics. The struggle for female hyperfiction writers to represent their changing identities in relation to a shifting reality is, like Meltzer's view of the mimetic portrait, in a constant conversation. A hyper representation of female experience which rebels against the static mires of Aristotelian mimesis is always looking out to reality and looking in to individual identity.
John Boyd's systematic study, The Function of Mimesis and Its Decline presents his view of the mimetic critical tradition as extending, in one form or another, from classical antiquity down to the end of the eighteenth century. Boyd understands mimesis as an objective tradition, "object-oriented, outward-going, especially by comparison with what followed in the nineteenth century and after." For Boyd the defense of literature in the mimetic tradition moves from a view of poetry as conveying truth through the very process of representing a reality external to it. The underlying presumption though for Boyd, like others is that personal experience is not pertinent to mimesis, "poetry or literature is looked upon as an imitation of life." For him art represents a singular
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