Abstract

The objective of this essay is to analyse, in a psychoanalytic perspective, the techniques of representation of reality of the modernist writers at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The «crisis of representation» of the modernist writers will not be considered as the end of mimesis, but rather as the basis of new ways to represent reality. This essay aspires to contribute to the present debate on the relation between literature and reality and is addressed also to a non-specialist audience. The main instruments are the studies of Erich Auerbach, with a particular attention to Mimesis, and the works of the Chilean psychiatrist Ignacio Matte Blanco and his notion of unconscious as infinite sets.