(Re)presenting Mimesis – sisemiM gnitneserp(eR)

are circumspect. They would agree with Christopher Prendergast that the authoritarian gesture of 'mimesis as copy': imprison[s] them in a world which, by virtue of its familiarity, is closed to analysis and criticism, in which the 'prescriptive' and the 'normative' (themselves tacit) ensure that the 'descriptive' remains at the level of the undiscussed, in the taken-for-grantedness of the familiar: mimesis deals in familiarities ('recognitions'), but the recognitions it supplies are often misrecognitions ('méconnaissances').

Mimetic terms, as understood by Prendergast, assume a relatively stable, self-sufficient and knowable world and some form of representational or reflective relation between the world and texts which is primary in processes of meaning-making. Its terms also continue to hold faith in the human subject as the origin of her own thoughts and judgments and in this human subject's transparent access to the world through consciousness. To that extent, texts, paintings, sculptures, and so on become intermediary as objects inserted between autonomous human subjects and the world known and experienced by them. It is a way of thinking about the relation between language and the world that has reduced what Peirce describes as the essentially triadic nature of human semiosis and what Timothy Reiss refers to as the "Galilean trinity of mind/language/phenomenon" to a sober dichotomy in which: language reveals thought, and in so far as [language] refers to objects it can operate as a perfect stand-in for them. It is not, to be sure, the object itself; but it is conceived of as a sufficiently accurate representation for the purposes of discourse, into whose system it may be inserted.

The problem here, thus, for Battin, Zellen and Malloy is the conventionalising and naturalising effect mimetic theories like Reiss's have. Aporetic towards representation yet still seeking to represent their metamorphosing stories these hyperfiction writers continually perform a self-reflexive trichotomy. For them mimesis becomes a multidimensional figure to be reworked and refined.

1. Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulations," Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) 166-184, 18 Dec. 2003, European Graduate School Homepage, 12 December 2003 . 2. See Charles Lemert: "...theories of the postmodern are not so much arguments from undisputed facts as representations of a way of understanding the world...Postmodernism is the culture that takes seriously the breaking apart of the world, which, if this is what is happening, is clearly a question of just how hyperreal is reality?" (my italics) in Postmodernism Is Not What You

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