EDWARD AUERBACH

Erich Auerbach

Erich Auerbach's 'Mimesis' still stands as a monumental achievement in literary criticism which has taught generations how to read Western literature. This expanded edition includes an introductory essay by Edward Said, and an essay by Auerbach, translated into English, in which he responds to his critics.

The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

Mimesis

Edward W. Said

More than half a century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis remains a masterpiece of literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. This new expanded edition includes a substantial essay in introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay, never before translated into English, in which Auerbach responds to his critics. A German Jew, Auerbach was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935. He left for Turkey, where he taught at the state university in Istanbul. There he wrote Mimesis, publishing it in German after the end of the war. Displaced as he was, Auerbach produced a work of great erudition that contains no footnotes, basing his arguments instead on searching, illuminating readings of key passages from his primary texts. His aim was to show how from antiquity to the twentieth century literature progressed toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. This essentially optimistic view of European history now appears as a defensive--and impassioned--response to the inhumanity he saw in the Third Reich. Ranging over works in Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English, Auerbach used his remarkable skills in philology and comparative literature to refute any narrow form of nationalism or chauvinism, in his own day and ours. For many readers, both inside and outside the academy, Mimesis is among the finest works of literary criticism ever written. This Princeton Classics edition includes a substantial introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay in which Auerbach responds to his critics.

Erich Auerbach’s Dante: Poet of the Secular World is an inspiring introduction to one of world’s greatest poets as well as a brilliantly argued and still provocative essay in the history of ideas. Here Auerbach, thought by many to be the greatest of twentieth-century scholar-critics, makes the seemingly paradoxical claim that it is in the poetry of Dante, supreme among religious poets, and above all in the stanzas of his Divine Comedy, that the secular world of the modern novel ﬁrst took imaginative form. Auerbach’s study of Dante, a precursor and necessary complement to Mimesis, his magisterial overview of realism in Western literature, illuminates both the overall structure and the individual detail of Dante’s work, showing it to be an extraordinary synthesis of the sensuous and the conceptual, the particular and the universal, that redeﬁned notions of human character and fate and opened the way into modernity. CONTENTS I. Historical Introduction; The Idea of Man in Literature II. Dante's Early Poetry III. The Subject of the "Comedy" IV. The Structure of the "Comedy" V. The Presentation VI. The Survival and Transformation of Dante's Vision of Reality Notes Index

Poet of the Secular World

Dante

Marcus Vinicius Mazzari

Introdução aos estudos literários

Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach

Erich Auerbach (1892-1957), best known for his classic literary study Mimesis, is celebrated today as a founder of comparative literature, a forerunner of secular criticism, and a prophet of global literary studies. This book presents a selection of Auerbach's essays, many of which are little known outside the German-speaking world.

Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach

Time, History, and Literature

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Don Chisciotte della Mancia

Scenes from the Drama of European Literature was first published in 1984. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In his foreword to this reprint of Erich Auerbach's major essays, Paolo Valesio pays tribute to the author with an old saying that he feels is still the best metaphor for the genesis of a literary critic: the critic is born of the marriage of Mercury and Philology. The German-born Auerbach was a scholar who specialized in Romance philology, a tradition rooted in German historicism—the conviction that works of art must be judged as products of variable places and times, not from the eye of eternity, nor by a single unchanging aesthetic standard. The mercurial element in Auerbach's work is significant, for in a life of motion—of exile from Hitler's Germany—he came to believe that literary history was evolutionary, ever-changing—a view reflected in the title of his book, which suggests life and literature are historical drama. Auerbach is best known for his magisterial study Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, written during the war, in Istanbul, when he was far from his own culture and from the books that he normally relied on. In 1957, just before his death, he arranged for the publication in English of his six most important essays, in a volume called Scenes from the Drama of European Literature.As in Mimesis,Auerbach's fresh insights bring to the disparate subjects of the essays a coherence that reflects the unity of Western, humanistic tradition, even while they hint at the deepening pessimism of his later years. In the first essay, "Figura," Auerbach develops his concept of the figural interpretation of reality; applied here to Dante's Divine Comedy,it also served as groundwork for his treatment of realism in Mimesis. A second essay on Dante's examines the poet's depiction of St. Francis of Assisi. The next three essays deal with the paradoxical nature of Pascal's political thought; the merging of la cour and la ville—the king's entourage and the bourgeoisie—chiefly in relation to the seventeenth-century French theater; and Vico's formulation concepts by the German Romantics. In the final essay Auerbach confers upon Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal the designation "aesthetic dignity" because, not in spite of, the hideous reality of the peoms. "A major collection of important essays on European literature, almost all classics, and almost all required reading for their various centuries—thus the book is indispensable for the medieval period,the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries; in addition, the 'Figura' and the Vico essays are very significant theoretical statements. The book is lucid and far more accessible for undergraduates than, say, current high theory. Nor has Auerbach's own work aged . . . All of his varied strengths are evidence in this collection, which is a better way into his work than Mimesis." –Fredric Jameson, University of California, Santa Cruz.

Scenes from the Drama of European Literature

A edição brasileira de Mimesis, a obra monumental de Erich Auerbach, referência absoluta para os estudos literários e literatura comparada, completa cinquenta anos de sua primeira publicação. O ensaio permanece vivo em seu campo, ajudando a formar multidões de pensadores, não obstante as profundas mudanças pelas quais o mundo atravessou nesse tempo e o aparecimento de grandes teóricos da crítica literária. Mimesis encanta pela abrangência da análise, seja pelo vasto período de tempo, seja pela multiplicidade de obras e estilos que traz, que lhe dá, nas palavras de Manuel da Costa Pinto, um "sentido épico [...] – nada menos do que um afresco da civilização ocidental por meio de suas obras mais representativas". Mimesis é obra de um homem que perde sua pátria e é obrigado a se exilar e se isolar. Em terra estranha, nas margens de uma Europa conflagrada pela Segunda Guerra Mundial, Erich Auerbach, sem um futuro à sua frente, para seguir vivendo agarra-se àquilo a que dedicou a vida, a literatura – que naquele momento ardia em fogueiras imensas em sua Berlim natal. Em seu espírito descortina-se uma nova perspectiva, que ele quer compartilhar: a da representação da realidade na literatura ocidental. Como ele próprio afirma, o que aqui se apresenta é uma visão, jamais uma teoria fechada. Auerbach seleciona seus locais aprazíveis e não por acaso começa com Homero e a Bíblia, os dois pilares do Ocidente europeu. Dali até o farol de Virginia Woolf será uma longa, insólita e, como o tempo o provou, inesquecível jornada, de abrangência inaudita, da qual cada capítulo deste livro é um instantâneo, um recorte. O mundo que originou esta obra já não existe mais. Aquela guerra também acabou, ainda que suas palavras de ordem continuem encantando seguidores, inclusive hoje. Mimesis também permanece – vital como no tempo em que foi escrito, resiliente como o leitor de todos os tempos e quadrantes –, reerguendo-se das cinzas da ignorância sempre mais uma vez, pois como afirma Edward W. Said, "seu exemplo humanista permanece imorredouro".

Mimesis: A Representação da Realidade na Literatura Ocidental

Seit dem Erscheinen von "Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur" im Jahr 1946 ist Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) als Klassiker der Geisteswissenschaften bekannt. Die Entstehung des Buches im Istanbuler Exil ohne westliche Bibliotheken ist legendär. Weniger bekannt sind seine luziden Essays und detailreichen Studien zur romanischen Philologie, die Gustav Konrad und Fritz Schalk posthum - ergänzt um wichtige Rezensionen - herausbrachten. Methodisch stand der deutsch-jüdische Gelehrte sowohl der Frankfurter Literatursoziologie seines Freundes Walter Benjamin nahe als auch der hermeneutischen Tradition an der Universität Marburg; zudem gibt es Nähen zur Ikonographie der Warburg Schule. Das Nachwort gibt im wissenschaftshistorischen Rahmen eine Skizze von Erich Auerbach als Kulturphilosophen im Exil, der eine vieldeutige wie außergewöhnliche Position zwischen jüdischen, christlichen und säkularen Traditionen des Denkens einnimmt. Die Neuausgabe der "Gesammelten Aufsätze" wurde um vier Arbeiten werkgeschichtlich ergänzt. Eine von ihnen, "Vicos Auseinandersetzung mit Descartes", galt bislang als verschollen und wurde erst kürzlich gefunden. Eine ausführliche Bibliographie schließt Lücken der Primärliteratur.

Herausgegeben und ergänzt um Aufsätze, Primärbibliographie und Nachwort von Matthias Bormuth und Martin Vialon

Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen Philologie – Studienausgabe

Seit dem Erscheinen von "Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur" im Jahr 1946 ist Erich Auerbach (18921957) als Klassiker der Geisteswissenschaften bekannt. Die Entstehung des Buches im Istanbuler Exil ohne westliche Bibliotheken ist legendär. Weniger bekannt sind seine luziden Essays und detailreichen Studien zur romanischen Philologie, die Gustav Konrad und Fritz Schalk posthum ergänzt um wichtige Rezensionen herausbrachten. Methodisch stand der deutsch-jüdische Gelehrte sowohl der Frankfurter Literatursoziologie seines Freundes Walter Benjamin nahe als auch der hermeneutischen Tradition an der Universität Marburg; zudem gibt es Nähen zur Ikonographie der Warburg Schule. Das Nachwort gibt im wissenschaftshistorischen Rahmen eine Skizze von Erich Auerbach als Kulturphilosophen im Exil, der eine vieldeutige wie außergewöhnliche Position zwischen jüdischen, christlichen und säkularen Traditionen des Denkens einnimmt. Die Neuausgabe der "Gesammelten Aufsätze" wurde um vier Arbeiten werkgeschichtlich ergänzt. Eine von ihnen, "Vicos Auseinandersetzung mit Descartes", galt bislang als verschollen und wurde erst kürzlich gefunden. Eine ausführliche Bibliographie schließt Lücken der Primärliteratur.

Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen Philologie

Studi su Dante

Kenelm Foster

Luigi Pirandello

Thomas Stearns Eliot

Charles Williams

Gianfranco Contini

Leo Spitzer

Charles Southward Singleton

Georges Poulet

Renato Poggioli

Bruno Nardi

Robert Earl Kaske

Alessandro Passerin d'Entrèves

Fourteen essays which examine the problem of the relationship of poetry to belief in Dante's "The Divine Comedy".

A Collection of Critical Essays

An Eye for Music

Ensaios de literatura ocidental

I fiori del male e il sublime

Erich Auerbach

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