Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005

by René Girard, Robert Doran (Editor)

Overview

Mimesis and Theory brings together twenty of René Girard's uncollected essays on literature and literary theory, which, along with his classic, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, have left an indelible mark on the field of literary and cultural studies. Spanning over fifty years of critical production, this anthology offers unique insights into the origin, development, and expansion of Girard's "mimetic theory"—a groundbreaking account of human interaction and of the genesis of cultural forms.

The essays run the gamut of Western literary culture, from Racine and Shakespeare to the existentialist writings of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. The authors who have most influenced Girard—Stendhal, Proust, and Dostoevsky—receive extended treatment, and Girard's observations on the changing landscape of literary studies are chronicled in several essays devoted to psychoanalysis, formalism, structuralism, and post-structuralism.

Though at times overshadowed by his work in religious and cultural anthropology, Girard's work in the area of literary studies has been the wellspring of his thought. All of the essays in this volume develop the idea that the greatest authors are also the greatest students of human nature, for their artistic intuitions are generally more penetrating than the analyses of the philosophers or the social scientists. Girard does not offer us a theory of literature but literature as theory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804781077
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	12/22/2011
Series:	Cultural Memory in the Present
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

René Girard is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor Emeritus of French Civilization at Stanford Universityand a member of the Académie française. Robert Doran is James P. Wilmot Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Rochester.

Table of Contents

Editor's Note     ix
Editor's Introduction: Literature as Theory     xi
History in Saint-John Perse     1
Valery and Stendhal     13
Classicism and Voltaire's Historiography     26
Pride and Passion in the Contemporary Novel     33
Stendhal and Tocqueville     42
Memoirs of a Dutiful Existentialist: Simone de Beauvoir     50
Marcel Proust     56
Marivaudage, Hypocrisy, and Bad Faith     71
Formalism and Structuralism in Literature and the Human Sciences     80
Racine, Poet of Glory     96
Monsters and Demigods in Hugo     125
Bastards and the Antihero in Sartre     134
Critical Reflections on Literary Studies     160
Narcissism: The Freudian Myth Demythified by Proust     175
Theory and Its Terrors     194
Love and Hate in Chretien de Troyes' Yvain     214
Innovation and Repetition     230
Mimetic Desire in the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky     246
Conversion in Literature and Christianity     263
The Passionate Oxymoron in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet     274
Sources     291
Notes     293
Index     305

Editorial Reviews

"[T]his collection spans the course of Girard's career and provides a concise way to gain some perspective on his legacy . . . One the whole, this volume confirms Girard's reputation as a first-rate literary critic, devoted to the close study of literary texts but avoiding the pitfalls of l'art pour l'art formalism by asking extra-literary, essentially anthropological, questions of them, and emphasizing the insights and lessons that literature has to offer us in those matters that are of greatest import to us."—Eric Prieto, SubStance

From the Publisher

"[T]his collection spans the course of Girard's career and provides a concise way to gain some perspective on his legacy . . . One the whole, this volume confirms Girard's reputation as a first-rate literary critic, devoted to the close study of literary texts but avoiding the pitfalls of l'art pour l'art formalism by asking extra-literary, essentially anthropological, questions of them, and emphasizing the insights and lessons that literature has to offer us in those matters that are of greatest import to us."

SubStance - Eric Prieto