0 the act of representing or imitating reality in art, especially literature:
For both Plato and Aristotle, artistic mimesis is relatively incapable of expressing the character of fundamental reality.
Physical structures are grasped as embodied sensations, through an unconscious bodily mimesis.
What happens, for example, when representation is no longer merely mimesis but a more than adequate substitute, when paper becomes more or better than gold?
Looking at them closely allows us to see how a great achievement of literary mimesis explores its own mythologies of art.
Mimesis, in this sequence, is a process of staging - or coming into being - that is never fully achieved.
In a manner appropriate to popular (as opposed to neoclassical) comedy, the improvisatory vitality of performance subverts the literary predictability of conventional mimesis.
Because of the central role of sound recording and reproduction, the concept of mimesis or the mimetic is also used as a theoretical tool.
It therefore appears that the practice might problematise the classical pairing of mimesis (showing) and diegesis (telling).
These performances are mimetic representations, of course, but by largely substituting the conventions of popular clowning for those of dramatic impersonation they effectively mock mimesis.
