Mimetic Theory, Religion, and Literature as Secular Scripture

Abstract

Girard favors those few writers already identified as literary masters and, early on, in periods of great creative power: Periclean Athens, the time of the great Greek tragedians, Elizabethan England, above all Shakespeare (to whom Girard solely devoted his only book written in English), and the modern novel inaugurated in Cervantes. Girard would scale up their qualifications as masters of mimesis, as he would add to Erich Auerbach’s discussion of the mimetic tradition of the great writers, by identifying their greatness in the way they understand, not simply the way they practice, imitation. If their method is imitation, it is first of all because they must carefully render the imitative behavior of their human subjects in order to reveal its bases and its consequences. Their genius and their powers of application are devoted to the accuracy that is required for their research in human behavior as much as their success in providing esthetic pleasure through precise and compelling rendering.