Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Hans-Wolfgang Schaller: The Survival of the Novel: E. L. Doctorow's Escape out of the Postmodern Deadend

HANS-WOLFGANG SCHALLER THE SURVIVAL OF THE NOVEL: E. L. DOCTOROW'S ESCAPE OUT OF THE POSTMODERN DEADEND I 20th century literary theory has been marked by a continuously increasing radical rejection of the notion that literature is able to portrait or to represent reality. This is a decisive deviation from the more than 2000 years old tradition of western thought to believe in mimesis as a key term to explain the special contribution of art to the understanding of life and to point at the uniqueness of human existence. Aristotle, for example, in his Poetics claimed that mimesis, the faculty to imitate reality is the distinguishing human quality which enables us, other than all other life forms, to learn about the world around and beyond us. Mimesis, then, is the distinctive human ability to widen our horizon and to transcend the limits of a mere existence which would be simply aiming at maintaining biological functions intact. The fundamental initial notion of mimesis is that there is something outside ourselves, some covert Order of things which includes our very existence and the knowledge of which would be fundamental to understand who we are.

1 The basic assumption of course is that man is able to correlate self and not self and that the artistic representation of the non-self in itself is valid and that the sign used for depicting the non-self really is a reliable referent of the 1 cp. Joseph C. Schopp, Ausbruch aus der Mimesis. Der amerikanische Roman im Zeichen der Postmoderne, München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1990, 19-45. 87