Mimesis and Its Romantic Reflections (review)

Frederick Burwick's Mimesis and Its Romantic Reflections represents an important contribution to the field of romantic studies in its coupling of romantic literature with mimetic representation. In an astute introduction that draws primarily on the writings of Aristotle, Plato, Jacques Derrida, and René Girard, Burwick adroitly explains the theoretical foundations of mimetic interpretation and disagrees with earlier scholars whose discussions of mimesis have excluded romantic authors. He notes, for example, that Erich Auerbach ignores the Romantics in his seminal work Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), and that subsequent scholars have dismissed mimetic theory in their discussions of romantic literature. Indeed, M. H. Abrams's influential book The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) asserts that, as Burwick summarizes, "attention to mimetic representation was replaced during the romantic period by an expressive mode of creativity in the arts" (8). In Burwick's terms, however, mimetic theory played a vital role in the Romantic aesthetic. The Romantics' obsession with self and individuality facilitated a realignment of mimetic theory so that writers like Samuel Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Thomas De Quincey constructed their own paradigm for mimesis that allowed them to represent not external reality, but the very act of creative artistic production.

The first three of Burwick's six chapters compose the more theoretical and more stimulating half of the book, where Burwick's lucid prose treats the concepts of l'art pour l'art, idem et alter, and the palingenesis of mind as art. In the first chapter, Burwick suggests, convincingly, that Coleridge and subsequent Romantics adopted the stance that the object of an artistic work was not to depict a static product, but rather, the process of artistic creation. Coleridge based his approach on the idea of l'art pour l'art (art for art's sake), whose origin Burwick traces to Henry Crabb Robinson's discussions of Friedrich Schelling's aesthetics with Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Staël in the early nineteenth century. Although Robinson may have coined the term l'art pour l'art, de Staël popularized the idea and its implications that art must achieve beauty and meaning independent of morality and politics. De Staël complicated her paradigm for successful art with theories from A. W. Schlegel and Immanuel Kant to suggest that readers must understand the creative process of writing to understand an artistic work. Romantics like Coleridge embraced the independence, individualism, and self-reflexivity implied in de Staël's formulations and incorporated that freedom into their own conceptions of artistic mimesis.

Burwick's second chapter supports Coleridge's concept of idem et alter, the idea that a successful artistic work combines identity and alterity dialectically in the mimetic act. While an artistic work may attempt a mimetic representation of the artist's thought processes, the medium in which the artist works necessarily introduces an element of otherness—alterity—into the representation. Confrontation with alterity extends one's "range of identity" (52). As Burwick comments, "Identity defines itself in terms of what is different. But in each encounter with difference, identity changes. Difference becomes familiar and is absorbed by sensation and thought into identity" (57). Identity and alterity complicate mimesis by defining one another.

As Coleridge developed his aesthetic theory, he drew further on Schelling's philosophy to distinguish between the terms copy and imitation, as Burwick discusses in chapter 3. Extending the analysis from his first two chapters, Burwick illuminates the mimetic bent of Coleridge's thought to explain that while a copy was no more than a reproduction to Coleridge, an imitation exhibited "conscious artistry" (95). In Coleridgean terms, "artistic imitation is 'self-exposition,' the palingenesis of the mind as art" (78). For the Romantics, the artist's own mind became the subject of art.

The second half of Burwick's discussion, comprising the final three chapters, is less theoretical and less engaging than the first half, but Burwick sustains a convincing argument about ekphrasis, mirrored reflections, and "twice-told tales" as tropes...