Mattias Pirholt, Metamimesis: Imitation in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Early German Romanticism. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. 220 pp.

Summary

In this ambitious monograph, Mattias Pirholt argues against those who find in German Romanticism a wholesale refutation of mimetic aesthetics. He proposes instead that Romantics reinterpreted ideas from eighteenth-century debates on representation, such as the productivity of both the artist and nature and the conception of art as a formation of alternative and ideal worlds. The Romantic work combines both mimetic and self-reflective practices; it reproduces mimesis metapoetically as a representation of representation and reflects on the very conditions of representation. As such, Romantic mimesis is inherently metamimesis, a transcendental investigation into the relationship between life and poetry.

The monograph has five main chapters. The first is a theoretical and historical introduction to the Romantic period, the concept of mimesis, and the genre of the novel. In Romanticism, mimesis represents poiesis. That is, it imitates not a static object but a creative process that strives for the unattainable. In this context, the novel is the mimetic genre par excellence due to its preoccupation with life in all its aspects. In striving for the absolute, the metamimetically self-reflec tive novel contains and reflects all forms of poetic expression. Its focus on the production of life transforms questions of aesthetics into questions of social relations and the form of society.

In the following chapters Pirholt analyzes four influential novels written around 1800. Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre is the starting point, both as irritation and inspiration, for the metamimetic novels of Romanticism. In Goethe's novel Pirholt finds two modes of representation—narration and dialogue— which mirror Plato's distinction between diegesis and mimesis. Goethe is unable to mend the rupture between these two modes except with a new kind of image, one that is indicated but never fully realized in the novel: the symbol. In the image and the symbol, one finds representation of the unity that supports and precedes difference. For Goethe, representational difference constitutes both a point of departure for the protagonist's life story and a state to be overcome.

In subsequent chapters Pirholt focuses on Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde, Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and Clemens Brentano's Godwi, reading each as a metamimetic response to the problem that Goethe posed. In Schlegel's text, repetition constitutes the principal aesthetic structure, and in this regard, the novel is intrinsically mimetic.