Jump to ContentJump to Main Navigation
PresencePhilosophy, History, and Cultural Theory for the Twenty-First Century$
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content.
Presence: Philosophy, History, and Cultural Theory for the Twenty-First Century

Ranjan Ghosh and Ethan Kleinberg

Print publication date: 2013

Print ISBN-13: 9780801452208

Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: August 2016

DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9780801452208.001.0001

Show Summary Details
Page of

PRINTED FROM Cornell University Press SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.cornell.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright University of Cornell University Press, 2022. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in Cornell for personal use. date: 27 June 2022

Be Here Now

Be Here Now

Mimesis and the History of Representation

Chapter:
(p.26) 2 Be Here Now
Source:
Presence
Author(s):

Vincent P. Pecora

Publisher:
Cornell University Press
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9780801452208.003.0003

This chapter focuses on the work of art, poetry, and the place of aesthetics in understanding the relation of presence and representation. By engaging with the works of Gumbrecht and Elaine Scarry, this chapter considers whether the turn to presence is a return to the modernist agon of mimesis versus representation in which the “discovery” of the viability of concepts such as beauty and “presence” are primarily a rediscovery of the lure of a redemptive mimesis in the face of a fallen world of representation. In the end, the underlying recourse in Scarry and Gumbrecht to archaic mimesis as an antidote to representation implies the persistence within the modern humanities of a deeper discontent with the humanistic enterprise itself. For both, it is the apparent loss of the untutored (childlike) innocence of human perception that should matter most of all.

Keywords:   representation, Hans Gumbrecht, Elaine Scarry, mimesis, human perception, aesthetics, modernism

Cornell Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.

Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.

To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.