Mimetic Tradition and the Critical Theory

Öz

Mimesis as a concept essentially refers to the basic principle that art, and therefore the artist, copies nature. In other words, the mimetic theory of art is particularly based upon the assumption that any form of representative arts is a copy of nature. Mimesis, as a critical term as it is in use today, has originally emerged from the theoretical writings and discussions of two prominent classical Greek sources. It was, according to the acknowledgement of the Western canonical literary theory, Plato and Aristotle, who methodically established and expanded the connotations of the term to their students and followers. Plato, for example, associates mimesis with imitation. According to Plato, however, imitation, and thus whoever and whatever is associated with imitation, will be harmful since imitation is removed from the truth itself. Plato, as a result of this, banishes representative arts, and the artists, from a healthy state. Poetry, Plato believes, is misleading as it is only an illusion. Therefore, Plato builds an unfavourable model of mimesis. In addition to Plato, his most outstanding pupil, Aristotle, agrees with his tutor on the principle that poetry, as a form of the representative arts, is mimetic. However, Aristotle postulates that mimesis, which denotes imitation, further proposes the notion of interpretation. Moreover, mimesis, Aristotle believes, is a natural part of man since man is an imitative being. In addition to this, mimesis for Aristotle is an important component of the process of education. Western critical heritage, particularly the English, is mimetic. Especially during the English Renaissance, and especially after the discovery of the original copy of Aristotle’s Poetics, the idea of mimesis becomes more and more authoritative in English literature and literary theory. Sir Philip Sidney, as a representative of the sixteenth-century English writer and statesman, translates the classical notion of mimesis into his own practise. Sidney foregrounds the idea of interpretation that mimesis signifies. During the English Romanticism, for example, William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge interpret mimesis in their cultural epoch. This study, therefore, makes an analytical reading of the meaning of the term mimesis starting from the classical examples and ending with twentieth-century interpretations.