mimesis


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mi·me·sis

 (mĭ-mē′sĭs, mī-)
n.
1. The imitation or representation of aspects of the sensible world, especially human actions, in literature and art.
2. Biology Mimicry.
3. Medicine The appearance, often caused by hysteria, of symptoms of a disease not actually present.
[Greek mīmēsis, from mīmeisthai, to imitate, from mīmos, imitator, mime.]
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

mimesis

(mɪˈmiːsɪs)
n
1. (Art Terms) art literature the imitative representation of nature or human behaviour
2. (Pathology)
a. any disease that shows symptoms of another disease
b. a condition in a hysterical patient that mimics an organic disease
3. (Biology) biology another name for mimicry2
4. (Rhetoric) rhetoric representation of another person's alleged words in a speech
[C16: from Greek, from mimeisthai to imitate]
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

mim•ic•ry

(ˈmɪm ɪk ri)

n., pl. -ries.
1. the act, practice, or art of mimicking.
2. the close resemblance of an organism to a different organism, such that it benefits from the mistaken identity, as in seeming to be unpalatable.
3. an instance or result of mimicking.
Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary, © 2010 K Dictionaries Ltd. Copyright 2005, 1997, 1991 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

mimesis

an imitation, used in literary criticism to designate Aristotle’s theory of imitation. — mimetic, adj.
See also: Criticism
-Ologies & -Isms. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:
Noun1.mimesis - the imitative representation of nature and human behavior in art and literaturemimesis - the imitative representation of nature and human behavior in art and literature
imitation - the doctrine that representations of nature or human behavior should be accurate imitations
2.mimesis - any disease that shows symptoms characteristic of another disease
hysterical neurosis, hysteria - neurotic disorder characterized by violent emotional outbreaks and disturbances of sensory and motor functions
3.mimesis - the representation of another person's words in a speech
quotation, quote, citation - a passage or expression that is quoted or cited
Based on WordNet 3.0, Farlex clipart collection. © 2003-2012 Princeton University, Farlex Inc.
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References in periodicals archive ?
The Berlin-based Algerian artist treats repair as a sort of corollary of mimesis. One of the root concepts of Western cultural production, mimesis (like the more familiar "mimicry") traces its origins back to the ancient Greek term for art's imitating the natural world.
Doing violence to the imitation of repair
She does so to show how these novels practice the middle-class promotion of mimesis, in which resemblance and likeness identify a one-to-one correspondence that obviates the fraud, deceit, and falsehood increasingly associated with the honorific culture of the aristocracy.
Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction; The Rise of Picture Identification, 1764-1835
This is an ambitious study of the relationship between mimesis and the ego that delineates a line of thought that begins with Friedrich Nietzche and descends through Joseph Conrad, D.H.
Nidesh Lawtoo, The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious
On the other hand, O'Connor goes to great lengths to elaborate a particularly nebulous term in Adorno's work: mimesis. Through the use of multiple examples such as Baudelaire and Kafka, O'Connor delves into 'mimesis', a term that O'Connor regards as '[t]he most elusive notion in all of Adorno's philosophy' (149).
Brian O'Connor: Adorno
In "The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious", his central topic--insight really--is the "loss of ego" in modernism, leaving only a "phantom of the ego." "[T]he experience of mimesis dissolves the modern ego in such a fundamental way that ...
The Phantom of the Ego
If he carefully constructs his films as meditations on original and copy, in his works on paper the LA-based artist takes mimesis to an extreme, rendering them all but indistinguishable from old photographs or paint-splattered newsprint.
Paul Sietsema
For example, in the approximate middle of chapter four, "The Broken Mirror: The Crisis of Artistic Mimesis," Mualem remarks that "the question of the relationship between literature and reality preoccupied Borges' thought throughout his life" (139) and then he proceeds to assess this preoccupation "diachronically," that is, chronologically.
Borges and Plato: A Game with Shifting Mirrors
The Aristotelian Psychology of Tragic Mimesis, JOSE M.
PHRONESIS: Vol. 64, No. 1, March 2019

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