For some time I’ve been posting essays on the topic of literary mimesis—also known as representation or world building. The topic is large and, to my mind, quite fascinating, but I feel like a change, so after this essay I will switch to another topic. Mimesis, world building, often involves some description of the objects … Continue reading Enough Mimesis (For Now, Anyway)

In this post I continue my discussion of mimesis—representation, world-building—in Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark. As I have said previously, in my system the synthetic, the mimetic, and the thematic are simultaneous, but they may be artificially separated for analytical purposes. In this post I will include a few comments on the synthetic … Continue reading Dr. Archie Delivers a Baby

In my previous post I looked at the structure of a sentence written by the Elizabethan theologian Richard Hooker and quoted by Herbert Read in his book, English Prose Style. In this post I will look at the context of the sentence, both internal and external. I begin by repeating the passage for ease of … Continue reading More on Faith, Hope, and Charity

Lately I’ve been posting on world building, the mimetic aspect of narrative, and I will continue that series later, but today I thought I would take a break and talk about style. Recently I came across an interesting passage in Herbert Read’s English Prose Style, first published in 1966. I wouldn’t place it at the … Continue reading Faith, Hope, and Charity

Lately I’ve been writing posts about narrative world building, the mimetic aspect of narrative, with particular attention to descriptions of moveable objects, including clothing. I’ve been concentrating on novels by three writers: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark, and Doris Lessing’s The Good Neighbour. There’s lots more to say … Continue reading More on Mimesis in Willa Cather’s “The Song of the Lark”

In my previous post I looked at some passages from Doris Lessing’s novel The Good Neighbour to show something about her techniques of world building, mimesis. There are many passages in the novel that show how interested she is in enumerating and describing things; these enumerations and descriptions contribute to the meaning of the novel, … Continue reading Lessing, Austen, Cather

In this post I will continue my discussion of mimesis—world building—in Doris Lessing’s novel The Good Neighbour. There is an overabundance of great mimetic material in this novel; I will hit some of the high points. In my previous post I discussed the beginning of The Good Neighbour—first, the initial summary of antecedent action (in … Continue reading More on Lessing

In my previous post I compared some passages of mimesis—world building—in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark. I was arguing that literary realism is not a simple category; literary language is not a transparent window through which we just look at what’s out there, even in realistic styles. … Continue reading Mimesis in Doris Lessing’s “The Good Neighbour”

Every novel presents a world to the reader. The building of a narrative world doesn’t have to happen all at once, though it’s common for at least some world building to occur at the beginning. If the world of a narrative is close to something we can, for the moment, call normal reality, then the … Continue reading Mimesis in Austen and Cather

It’s been a while since I posted anything about my current research project in narrative analysis. The approach I’m using looks at a narrative from three aspects: the synthetic, the mimetic, and the thematic. The synthetic aspect asks “How is this narrative composed?”; the mimetic aspect asks “What does it represent?”; and the thematic aspect … Continue reading Representation, Big and Small