Mimesis travestie, ou le « modernisme épuré » de William H. Gass

Although everything from Cartesian skepticism to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system of composition has been evoked in discussing the formal logic of William Gass’s novel, The Tunnel (1995), this paper argues that this logic is fundamentally speculative, in the Hegelian sense of the term, and furthermore that the germ of this logic lies in Plato’s double strategy of exclusion and appropriation of mimesis in The Republic. Far from merely repudiating mimesis, Gass’s (“modernist”) form-alism consists of its speculative purification. The same process is at work with less radical consequences in Gass’s previous novel, Omensetter’s Luck (1966), the onto-mimetological structure of which determines the author’s later work

Appropriation · Art · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Skepticism · Tone (literature · French Literature and Critical Theory · Historical and Literary Studies · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Philosophy

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