evidence to reinforce one of the major themes of Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of the Enlightenment (1944), which was itself in dialog with earlier work hinting in this direction by Walter Benjamin who died during an attempt to escape the gestapo. Calasso insinuates and references this lineage throughout the text. The work can be read as a clarification of their earlier gestures in this direction, written while the Holocaust was still unfolding. Calasso's earlier book The Celestial Hunter, written immediately prior to The Unnamable Present, is an informed and scholarly speculative cosmology depicting the possible origins and early prehistoric cultural evolution of the human mimetic faculty. In particular, the books first and fifth chapters ("In The Time of the Great Raven" and "Sages & Predators") focuses on the terrain of mimesis and its early origins, though insights in this territory appear as a motif in every chapter of the book. See also Similarity (philosophy) Man, Play and Games (Roger Caillois) References Classical sources Citations Bibliography Auerbach, Erich . 1953. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature . Princeton: Princeton UP. . Coleridge, Samuel T. 1983. Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, edited by J. Engell and W. J. Bate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. . Davis, Michael. 1999. The Poetry of Philosophy: On Aristotle's Poetics . South Bend, IN: St Augustine's P. . Elam, Keir. 1980. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama , New Accents series. London: Methuen. . Gebauer, Gunter, and Christoph Wulf. [1992] 1995. Mimesis: Culture—Art—Society , translated by D. Reneau. Berkeley, CA: U of California Press. . Girard, René. 2008. Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953–2005, edited by R. Doran. Stanford: Stanford University Press. . Halliwell, Stephen. 2002. The Aesthetics of Mimesis. Ancient Texts and Modern Problems . Princeton. . Kaufmann, Walter . 1992. Tragedy and Philosophy . Princeton: Princeton UP. . Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. 1989. Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, edited by C. Fynsk. Cambridge: Harvard UP. . Lawtoo, Nidesh. 2013. The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious. East Lansing: Michigan State UP. . Miller, Gregg Daniel. 2011. Mimesis and Reason: Habermas's Political Philosophy. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Pfister, Manfred. [1977] 1988. The Theory and Analysis of Drama , translated by J. Halliday, European Studies in English Literature series. Cambridige: Cambridge UP. . Potolsky, Matthew. 2006. Mimesis. London: Routledge. . Prang, Christoph. 2010. "Semiomimesis: The influence of semiotics on the creation of literary texts.