Michael E. O'Reilly

Aristotle and Plato had different views on mimesis If Aristotle’s view on art and mimesis makes him look like your undergrad Shakespeare professor who drove the VW bus, Plato’s view on art and mimesis makes him look like your uncle who designed tanks in the Army and said “I just don’t see the practical use of poems or art.”      Plato took a strict and rational approach to the definitions and implications of mimesis.  Aristotle also felt his own opinion on mimesis was rational.  In discussing poetry, for example, he used the parameters of “probability and necessity,” in defining good narrative form.      In the plainest sense, Plato understood mimesis to be an imitation or reproduction of something else.  His entire argument was based on the principle of reason, and he believed the end result of a man’s tinkering with his own sense of reason was an inferior man.      While Plato believed mimesis was imitation, Ar...

About the source texts: In realist art we are provided with a nebulae of seemingly natural details and conventions. Because these details are unremarkable they are lost until we give them names.  In S/Z , Roland Barthes wants to analyze the artistic and cultural codifications shaping the hard-to-pin-down movement we call "realism."   In Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues against the use and importance of the imitative arts, claiming they are destructive to the soul as well as the city.  In Ferdinan de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, we are provided with a way of looking at language, which also becomes a way of looking at cultural and societal structures.  Saussure challenges Plato by proposing language as the origin of concepts, or forms.  In doing so, Saussure highlights the major flaw in Plato’s interpretation of art.  I will argue that Plato was narrow-minded in his view of art as strictly mimetic.  When Barthes comes along with his own rev...