Erich Auerbach's Mimesis—'Tis Fifty Years Since: A Reassessment - Critical Essay

Style, Fall, 1999 by William Calin

Notes

(1.) The proceedings of the Stanford conference (Lerer) are a tribute to Auerbach and a touchstone for critical opinion in this our "postmodern" age.

(2.) My term, "'Tis fifty years since," alludes, of course, to the subtitle of Scott's Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since, a novel which commemorates a time of transition in the history of Scotland no less momentous than the post-Second World War period for us.

(3.) I discuss them, with reference to Auerbach, in "Makers" and "Ernst Robert Curtius." See also Evans, "Ernst Robert Curtius," and Green, Literary Criticism.

(4.) Spitzer "places" Auerbach in "Development of a Method" (the original was published in Italian as "Sviluppo di un metodo") and in "Les [acute{e}]tudes de style."

(5.) Although the change of fashion in English studies has proved to be so rapid that, nowadays, Robertson is neglected, his impact was enormous and, in the long run, beneficial.

(6.) On Dante, the reader should consult, in addition to Mimesis, Auerbach's Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt and the articles, translated into Italian and collected in Studi su Dante.

(7.) Pierre Emmanuel informed me that, although he had never heard of figural typology, my reading of him was accurate; he said he must have picked up figura indirectly, from his immersion in a particular, quasi-underground tradition of Catholicism that surfaced in Bloy and Bernanos. He also was a passionate defender of D'Aubign[acute{e}].

(8.) The original German versions of the Pascal and Baudelaire articles plus six essays on Vico are also to be found in the Gesammelte Aufs[ddot{a}]tze.

(9.) This was already Hatzfeld's response as far back as the late 1940s.

(10.) Shoddy scholarship in this domain is demystified by Astradur Eysteinsson and by Joseph Frank, among others.

(11.) He himself wrote an outstanding piece of literary history: A History of Modern Poetry.

(12.) In Lerer, Literary History, Auerbach is deemed to be modernist in the opinion of Green, Landauer, and White.

(13.) I was Auerbach's last student and, during the year 1956-1957, his research assistant.

(14.) I consider Ziolkowski's essay, along with one by Evans, to be especially insightful readings of Auerbach. Evans also wrote one of the best studies on Curtius.

Works Cited

Auerbach, Erich. Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1929. Trans. Ralph Manheim: Dante, Poet of the Secular World. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961.

___. "The Esthetic Dignity of the Fleurs du Mal." Hopkins Review 4 (1950): 29-45. Rpt. Scenes 201-26, 246-49.

___. Gesammelte Aufs[ddot{a}tze zur romanischen Philologie. Bern: Francke, 1967.

___. Introduction aux [acute{e}]tudes de philologie romane. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1949. Trans. (abr.) Guy Daniels: Introduction to Romance Languages and Literature. New York: Capricorn, 1961.

___. Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Sp[ddot{a}]tantike und im Mittelalter. Bern: Francke, 1958. Trans. Ralph Manheim: Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.