Introduction

Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, Joel Hodge

Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperChapter

Abstract

![CDATA[The astonishingly wide-ranging oeuvre of Rene Girard developed out of his early literary studies. From the great French writers of the later-nineteenth century, along with the novels of Dostoyevsky, Girard derived his triangular understanding of desire, which is focused on the model rather than the object of desire (refer to the Appendix and Glossary for a short overview of Girard’s thought and definitions of key terms).1 The escalating pathologies of mimetic desire represented by envy, rivalry, and violence were also uncovered by Girard in these sources, affording an early foretaste of his later, more developed accounts of sacrifice and apocalypse. Meanwhile, Girard discovered earlier modern versions of his mimetic theory in the writings of Cervantes and Shakespeare. Girard has had very little to say about modernist twentieth-century narrative, despite acknowledging that a work such as The Waves, by Virginia Woolf, could have easily gone into Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Such developments in the literary field have been left to literary scholars inspired by Girard, such as William A. Johnsen on high modernism (Ibsen, Joyce, Woolf), Stephen Gardner on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jeremiah Alberg on Flannery O’Connor, Gary M. Ciuba on Southern fiction more generally (O’Connor, along with Porter, Percy, and Cormac McCarthy), Nidesh Lawtoo on Conrad and Lawrence, and Trevor Cribben Merrill on Milan Kundera. Girard has not ventured into media theory or modern forms of narrative (e.g. film), either. And, even in the wider Girardian conversation, the application of Girardian hermeneutics to media remains an area thus far, if not unexplored, then certainly underexplored. In a related way, although Girardian studies has taken up mediation, it has less commonly taken up the idea of how that mediation itself has been mediated— that is, it has rarely concerned itself with what is often called, albeit presumptively, “the media.” This volume attempts a partial remedy of this surprising lacuna.]]
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMimesis, Movies, and Media: Violence, Desire, and the Sacred. Volume 3
EditorsScott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, Joel Hodge
Place of PublicationU.S.
PublisherBloomsbury Academic
Pages1-4
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9781628924657
ISBN (Print)9781628924640
Publication statusPublished - 2015

Keywords

  • Girard
  • René
  • 1923-2015

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