What's the difference between metaphor and mimesis?

Metaphor


Definition:

  • (n.) The transference of the relation between one set of objects to another set for the purpose of brief explanation; a compressed simile; e. g., the ship plows the sea.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) If figurative language is defined as involving intentional violation of conceptual boundaries in order to highlight some correspondence, one must be sure that children credited with that competence have (1) the metacognitive and metalinguistic abilities to understand at least some of the implications of such language (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Nelson, 1974; Nelson & Nelson, 1978), (2) a conceptual organization that entails the purportedly violated conceptual boundaries (Lange, 1978), and (3) some notion of metaphoric tension as well as ground.
  • (2) Crawford's own poetry was informed by contact with refugees – "I began to think seriously about what it felt like to lose your country or culture, and in my first book, there are one or two poems that are versions of Vietnamese poems" – and scientists, whose vocabulary he initially "stole because it seemed so metaphorically resonant.
  • (3) As the metaphors we are using to conduct it show, the migration debate in Britain is sorely in need of some perspective.
  • (4) The spotlight metaphor seems inappropriate for visual attention in a dynamic environment.
  • (5) In a second experiment schizophrenics were significantly different from the depressives in showing less inclination to select a metaphorical meaning to an ambiguous adjective in a sentence.
  • (6) Three-quarters of the sample was impaired on at least one of four discourse tests (knowing the alternate meanings of ambiguous words in context; getting the point of figurative or metaphoric expressions; bridging the inferential gaps between events in stereotyped social situations; and producing speech acts that express the apparent intentions of others).
  • (7) It postulates the need of all sciences to operate with symbols of various levels of abstractions, including, in a very prominent way, metaphors.
  • (8) This summer, if all goes to plan, the metaphor will be vividly recast: the Globe's stage will itself become a world.
  • (9) According to the old metaphor of classical cybernetics the brain can be considered as a computer.
  • (10) And Crash is an extreme metaphor of the dangers that I see lying ahead of us.
  • (11) The metaphor of clinical work as textual explication, however, creates the expectation that there is a text somewhere to be found.
  • (12) So perhaps there is a political metaphor here after all.
  • (13) My friend had already climbed the same metaphorical mountain that I had just reached the summit of, and when she had reached the top she sat down and wept, much to the surprise of all her British friends.
  • (14) The results are discussed in terms of hemispheric memory for art works, metaphors, and the relationship between the two in the brain.
  • (15) The Oedipus myth has been a central metaphor in the evolution of psychoanalytic theory, particularly the psychoanalytic theory of development.
  • (16) Second, it refers to a metaphor representing the subjective experience of these patients who are unable to find a permanent identity but feel themselves sitting on the fence between a variety of different identities in a borderline position.
  • (17) The Tories, ever wedded to metaphors about killing foreigners, have called this the "Dambuster" moment.
  • (18) As critics of Mr Berlusconi have been barred from the state broadcaster Radiotelevisione Italia, Mr Fo protests that artists are being "defenestrated" metaphorically from the RAI for the same reasons that leftwing dissidents were literally thrown out of police station windows in the 1970s when Mr Fo wrote his work Accidental Death of an Anarchist.
  • (19) But that's not a metaphor: the universality of computation follows from the known laws of physics.
  • (20) Verbal processes later gain access to this graded perceptual knowledge, thus permitting the interpretation of synesthetic metaphors according to the rules of cross-modal perception.

Mimesis


Definition:

  • (n.) Imitation; mimicry.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) His great book Mimesis, published in Berne in 1946 but written while Auerbach was a wartime exile teaching Romance languages in Istanbul, was meant to be a testament to the diversity and concreteness of the reality represented in western literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf; but reading the 1951 essay one senses that, for Auerbach, the great book he wrote was an elegy for a period when people could interpret texts philologically, concretely, sensitively, and intuitively, using erudition and an excellent command of several languages to support the kind of understanding that Goethe advocated for his understanding of Islamic literature.
  • (2) Discovery of the fact that a subject identifies in an obvious way with another is at first only the awareness of a present process: involuntary mimesis, obedience to early 'identifying designations' or simple imitation deliberately carried out.
  • (3) In an attempt to underline the need to refer to an imaginary setting, in which the analytical relationship is acted out, the Authors have considered the possible relations between the concept of projective identification, as defined by Klein and further developed by Bion, and the idea of "Mimesis", which is inevitably involved in every story, and which confronts the imaginary at the very moment in which it is produced.
  • (4) She has also always played on mimesis and obvious sight gags: the willy as marrow, cucumber, milk bottle or beer can; breasts as fried eggs, melons or light bulbs; the vagina as a kebab, a bucket or a pair of false teeth.