A mimesis, a floresta de símbolos e o espelho da imitação / Mimesis, Forest of Symbols and Mirror of Imitation

This article aims at analysing the historical conditions in which Luiz Costa Lima built his theory of Mimesis troughout the decades of 1970s and 1980s, taking into account the “Brazilian intellectual system”, as the author himself use to call it. Keeping equal distance from the trends of Desconstructionism as well as from the Sociology of Literature, Costa Lima stresses the concept of mimesis as “production of difference”. The argument evolves by a comparison among Costa Limas’s theory and that of José Guilherme Merquior on the same subject of mimesis.