(Re)presenting Mimesis – sisemiM gnitneserp(eR)
men." Although highlighting the importance of a female reality Lanser and Radner lay claim to a common female experience. Similarly Sara Mills suggests that there is "such a thing as women's experience" proposing that "menstruation, menopause, potential child-bearing and child-rearing" are common to all women. She believes that "all women suffer discrimination because of patriarchy and experience oppression at the hands of men." Although these three female theorists advocate the necessity to recognise female experience as different from male experience, they may be accused of reductively essentialising. A mimesis representative of the wide-ranging and continually fluctuating identities will need to focus on difference and not commonality. Therefore, with the advent of internet technology and allegations of its greater freedom, power and anonymity it seems an enticing environment where women can write themselves and their experiences.
Shifting away from a textual mimesis McHale notes that "postmodern fiction turns out to be mimetic after all, but this imitation of reality is accomplished not so much at the level of its content, which is often manifestly un - or anti-realistic, as at the level of form." Describing the American life experience as a "discontinuous drama...which imitates the object of its mimesis, [revealing] the pluralistic, anarchistic, ontological landscape of industrial cultures McHale relentlessly refers to a universal all-encompassing reality of the "American life." Although arguing for its plurality McHale reduces American life to a generality proving Eagleton's assumption that "postmodern theory often operates with quite rigid binary oppositions" as "contradiction finds little place" in postmodern theorists' lexicons.
A similar paradox pervades hyperfictions by Wendy Battin, Jody Zellen and Judy Malloy. Their writings are wedded to conflict and opposition. Reading these hyperfictions, one is cognisant of each writers' wariness of binaries and dogmatic divisions and so shares in their ensuing oscillation between a struggle to represent (themselves and their experience) and an understanding of the problematics of representation. Within mimesis, it seems, certainly at the most general level; an equation has been drawn between language and its objects that has the reassuring, comforting quality of the self-evident. It has made the common-sense presumption that the mime must have an object. The penetrating authority of this equation and its apparent transparency has made the mimetic approach to analysis and criticism very appealing for its certainties: mimesis depends on a notion of what the world already is. It is these existing notions of which Battin, Zellen and Malloy are
Latest Articles