MIMESIS Munich Doctoral Program for Literature and the Arts
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Area A: Theories of the Mimetic

Research area A grounds the entire program on a sound basis of theoretical work, familiarizing doctoral candidates with the current state of research and enabling them to map the broader field in which their own projects will be positioned.

Beginning with classic philosophers, through early modern debates on the validity of cultural production just as through modernist attempts to rethink the workings of the arts in the age of mechanical reproduction and, even more so, in an age of digital proliferation and remixing, right up to poststructuralist and contemporary interventions in the field of theory, the concept of mimesis has continuously been reformulated in processes of self-positioning. Following this development, mimesis offers a vital link between questions concerning the arts/literature, culture, anthropology and psychology. Mimesis has, in fact, long proved to be absolutely indispensable. If theory, according to the root meaning of this word, is about making visible and bringing to appearance, the theoretical is indeed akin to the mimetic.