in clearly anti-mimetic worlds. Furthermore, developments in the course of
a narrative can generate new relations among those interests. Indeed, many
narratives derive their special power from shifting rhetorical readers’ attention
from one kind of component to another: Nabokov’s Bend Sinister, for instance,
has the effect that it does in part because, in the closing pages, the mimetic is
drowned out by the synthetic.
12 • INTRODUCTION