Mimesis is among the oldest and most fundamental concepts of literary theory. Since Plato’s introduction of the term in the Republic it has continued to exert influence over theories of artistic representation. As Derrida wrote: ‘the whole history of the interpretation of the arts and letters has moved and been transformed within the diverse logical possibilities opened up by the concept of mimesis’ (cited in Potolsky 2006: 2). At first glance, the idea that literature imitates life makes sense as authors often seem to write about the world around them. However, the history of literary theory has witnessed a diverse range of attitudes towards this seemingly clear idea. While both Plato and Aristotle take their cue from the belief that art mirrors reality, they draw different conclusions as to the moral aspects of artistic representation. For Plato, the imitative nature of literature is a reason to ban poets and artists from the perfect city. As a mere copy of a copy, literature is illusory and deceptive. By contrast, Aristotle sees artistic imitation as perfectly ‘natural, rational and educational’ and even ‘beneficial’ (Potolsky 2006: 46). It does not merely copy the real; it has the potential to reveal universal truths and produce cathartic effects in human beings.

This paper contributes to the longstanding discussion on the imitative dimension of literary representation by approaching it from a computational and statistical perspective. More specifically, it explores the potential of social network analysis for studying the ways in which societal dynamics are realistically reflected in products of literary fiction. Using data-driven methods it thus draws on a tradition of literary criticism that prevailed between the 1930s and 1950s and that has recently been revitalized by scholars working with character network analysis (e.g. Smeets forthcoming, Selisker 2015, Labatut & Bost 2019). Often working with relatively large corpora, this tradition systematically studied how societal trends (female employment, national norms and values, divorce) were reflected in fiction (e.g. Inglis 1938, Berelson & Salter 1946, Barnett & Gruen 1948, Albrecht 1956). This paper explores the two general hypotheses that were often used as a point of departure in this research tradition: 1. literature reflects societal trends (the reflection theory), 2. literature shapes or incites societal trends (the social control theory). In doing so, it pays special attention to abstract, elusive notions such as ‘real’, ‘fictional’ and ‘reflection’ in light of discussions on mimesis. What does it mean for a societal phenomenon to be reflected, mirrored, echoed or reproduced in the interactions between fictional characters?

As a case study, it aims to trace the influence of second- and third-wave feminism on the position of female characters in Dutch language fiction. In light of the changing position of women in society, do we observe a shift in the position of female characters in a period of approximately 50 years? In order to answer this question, it compares earlier results on the centrality of female characters in a corpus of 170 Dutch novels published in 2012 (Smeets et al 2019, Smeets forthcoming) with a similar analysis of the centrality of female characters in a corpus of 160 novels published in the period 1961-1965, which is just before second-wave feminism took off in the Netherlands.

The methodological point of departure is the approach to character network analysis as developed in my books Character Constellations (2021) and Actual Fictions (2022). Based on the co-occurrence of characters on the sentence level (Smeets et al 2019), it semi-automatically extracts social networks of fictional characters from each of the novels in the corpora.^[1] This approach is semi-automatic in the sense that it uses automatic named entity recognition to detect characters and their name variants (‘Frits’, ‘Frits van Egters’, ‘Van Egters’), after which errors are manually corrected for each individual novel by two student-assistants. Gender resolution of these characters is also semi-automatic: based on lists of most popular Dutch male and female names of the Meertens voornamenbank, it is automatically estimated whether a character falls in one of three gender categories (male, female, gender neutral), after which errors are again manually corrected.^[2] Subsequently, a range of network centrality metrics is used to explore how important, dominant, or influential female characters are in the fictional networks extracted from the corpus. Do female characters in Dutch literature become more or less central between the 1960s and 2012? How can we interpret the answer to that question in light of the rise and peak of Dutch second- and third-wave feminism? Does it provide an argument for the reflection or for the social control theory? In order to disentangle the complexities of these questions, the statistical patterns are evaluated through a close reading of one novel from the corpus.

References

Albrecht, M. "Does literature reflect common values?." American Sociological Review 21.6 (1956): 722-729.

Barnett, J. & R. Gruen. "Recent American Divorce Novels, 1938-1945: A Study in the Sociology of Literature." Social Forces (1948): 322-327.

Berelson, B. & P. Salter. "Majority and minority Americans: An analysis of magazine fiction." Public Opinion Quarterly 10.2 (1946): 168-190.

Inglis, Ruth A. "An objective approach to the relationship between fiction and society." American Sociological Review 3.4 (1938): 526-533.

Labatut, V & X. Bost. “Extraction and Analysis of Fictional Character Networks: A Survey.”

ACM Computing Surveys 52.5 (2019): 89. https://doi.org/10.1145/3344548

Potolsky,  M.. Mimesis. The New Critical Idiom. New York/London (Routledge): 2006.

Smeets, R., E. Sanders, and A. van den Bosch. "Character Centrality in Present-Day Dutch Literary Fiction" Digital Humanities Benelux Journal (2019), 1, 71-90.

Smeets, R. Character Constellations. Representations of Social Groups in Present-Day Dutch Literary Fiction. Leuven (Leuven University Press): 2021.

Smeets, R. Actual Fictions. Literary Representation and Character Network Analysis. Cambridge (Cambridge University Press): 2022.

Volker, B. & R. Smeets. "Imagined social structures: Mirrors or alternatives? A comparison between networks of characters in contemporary Dutch literature and networks of the population in the Netherlands." Poetics (2019): 101379.