Mimesis
basic theoretical principle in the creation of art. The word is Greek and means “imitation” (though in the sense of “re-presentation” rather than of “copying”). Plato and Aristotle spoke of mimesis as the re-presentation of nature. According to Plato, all artistic creation is a form of imitation: that which really exists (in the “world of ideas”) is a type created by God; the concrete things man perceives in his existence are shadowy representations of this ideal type. Therefore, the painter, the tragedian, and the musician are imitators of an imitation, twice removed from the truth. Aristotle, speaking of tragedy, stressed the point that it was an “imitation of an action”—that of a man falling from a higher to a lower estate. Shakespeare, in Hamlet's speech to the actors, referred to the purpose of playing as being “ . . . to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature.” Thus, an artist, by skillfully selecting and presenting his material, may purposefully seek to “imitate” the action of life.
"mimesis." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 28 Aug. 2007
Mimetic Desire
Rene Girard's work goes along the lines that "The dominant opinion as well in the human sciences as for the common sense, is that we fixe our desire on an object in a completely autonomous way." He's talking about Freud, who argues, as Nicolas Wey-Gomez points out, that "hardly anything is harder than for a man to give up a pleasure that he has once experienced. Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another."
Memes
Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi discusses memes in The Evolving Self:
The term "meme" was introduced about twenty years ago by the British biologist Richard Dawkins, who used it to describe a unit of cultural information comparable in its effects on society to those of the chemically coded instructions contained in the gene on the human organism. The name harks back to the greek word mimesis. (120)
