Owen Holland

Learning through Imitation

Our gift for seeing similarity is nothing but a weak rudiment of the once powerful compulsion to become similar and also to behave mimetically. And the lost faculty of becoming similar extended far beyond the narrow perceptual world in which we are still capable of seeing similarities.

The best way of becoming a literary critic, then, is to read widely in the work of other literary critics, while also paying careful attention to the literary critic’s object of study.