In making a distinction between the School of Quietude and a blank parody of European-ish-ness, I am trying to separate the dreadfully claustrophohic notion of the "curiously inwrought thing" from a more liberatory, disruptive, and potentially queer notion of "Mannerism" by way of the metonymic distortions we find in Lacan's anamorphosis. This is not so much a literary question as much as a general inquiry about what constitutes realism and mimesis in the arts, along with the corresponding question of what the purpose of pathos might be.

By Tim Peterson at Mappemunde