Author: Jon Nixon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000579530
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176
Book Description
Auerbach was one of the foremost literary critics of the 20th century whose work has relevance within the fields of literary criticism, historiography and postcolonial theory. The opening chapter of this book explains how he understood the task of interpretation and his role as an interpreter. The following chapter outlines the important phases in his life with reference to the writers and thinkers who influenced him in his thinking and practice. The central chapters of the book focus on specific themes in his work: the historical grounding of the ‘figural’ imagination; the relation between the secular and the sacred; the emergence of tragic realism; and the notion of ‘inner history’ as a defining feature of early 20th-cenntury modernism. The final two chapters focus on broader issues relating to the development of Auerbach’s understanding of the development of an educated readership within Europe and of his concerns regarding the emergence of what he terms ‘a world literature’.
Erich Auerbach and the Secular World
Author: Jon Nixon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000579530
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176
Book Description
Auerbach was one of the foremost literary critics of the 20th century whose work has relevance within the fields of literary criticism, historiography and postcolonial theory. The opening chapter of this book explains how he understood the task of interpretation and his role as an interpreter. The following chapter outlines the important phases in his life with reference to the writers and thinkers who influenced him in his thinking and practice. The central chapters of the book focus on specific themes in his work: the historical grounding of the ‘figural’ imagination; the relation between the secular and the sacred; the emergence of tragic realism; and the notion of ‘inner history’ as a defining feature of early 20th-cenntury modernism. The final two chapters focus on broader issues relating to the development of Auerbach’s understanding of the development of an educated readership within Europe and of his concerns regarding the emergence of what he terms ‘a world literature’.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000579530
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176
Book Description
Auerbach was one of the foremost literary critics of the 20th century whose work has relevance within the fields of literary criticism, historiography and postcolonial theory. The opening chapter of this book explains how he understood the task of interpretation and his role as an interpreter. The following chapter outlines the important phases in his life with reference to the writers and thinkers who influenced him in his thinking and practice. The central chapters of the book focus on specific themes in his work: the historical grounding of the ‘figural’ imagination; the relation between the secular and the sacred; the emergence of tragic realism; and the notion of ‘inner history’ as a defining feature of early 20th-cenntury modernism. The final two chapters focus on broader issues relating to the development of Auerbach’s understanding of the development of an educated readership within Europe and of his concerns regarding the emergence of what he terms ‘a world literature’.
Dante
Author: Erich Auerbach
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9781590172193
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228
Book Description
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
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9781590172193
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228
Book Description
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
Time, History, and Literature
Author: Erich Auerbach
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691234523
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
Important essays from one of the giants of literary criticism, including a dozen published here in English for the first time 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. Yet the true depth of Auerbach's thinking and writing remains unplumbed. Time, History, and Literature presents a wide selection of Auerbach's essays, many of which are little known outside the German-speaking world. Of the twenty essays culled for this volume from the full length of his career, twelve have never appeared in English before, and one is being published for the first time. Foregrounded in this major new collection are Auerbach's complex relationship to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, his philosophy of time and history, and his theory of human ethics and responsible action. Auerbach effectively charts out the difficult discovery, in the wake of Christianity, of the sensuous, the earthly, and the human and social worlds. A number of the essays reflect Auerbach's responses to an increasingly hostile National Socialist environment. These writings offer a challenging model of intellectual engagement, one that remains as compelling today as it was in Auerbach's own time.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691234523
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
Important essays from one of the giants of literary criticism, including a dozen published here in English for the first time 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. Yet the true depth of Auerbach's thinking and writing remains unplumbed. Time, History, and Literature presents a wide selection of Auerbach's essays, many of which are little known outside the German-speaking world. Of the twenty essays culled for this volume from the full length of his career, twelve have never appeared in English before, and one is being published for the first time. Foregrounded in this major new collection are Auerbach's complex relationship to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, his philosophy of time and history, and his theory of human ethics and responsible action. Auerbach effectively charts out the difficult discovery, in the wake of Christianity, of the sensuous, the earthly, and the human and social worlds. A number of the essays reflect Auerbach's responses to an increasingly hostile National Socialist environment. These writings offer a challenging model of intellectual engagement, one that remains as compelling today as it was in Auerbach's own time.
Mimesis
Author: Erich Auerbach
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780691012698
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780691012698
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Scenes from the Drama of European Literature
Author: Erich Auerbach
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816612439
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Book Description
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.
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816612439
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Book Description
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.
Mimesis
Author: Erich Auerbach
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400847958
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 614
Book Description
The classic book that has taught generations how to read Western literature 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 depict reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. A German Jew who was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935, Auerbach left for Turkey, where he taught in Istanbul. There he wrote Mimesis, publishing it in German after 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 modernity, literature progresses toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. Ranging over works in Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English, Auerbach uses his remarkable skills in philology and comparative literature to present an optimistic view of Western history and culture and to refute any narrow form of nationalism or chauvinism. This expanded Princeton Classics edition of Mimesis includes a substantial introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay in which Auerbach responds to his critics.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400847958
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 614
Book Description
The classic book that has taught generations how to read Western literature 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 depict reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. A German Jew who was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935, Auerbach left for Turkey, where he taught in Istanbul. There he wrote Mimesis, publishing it in German after 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 modernity, literature progresses toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. Ranging over works in Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English, Auerbach uses his remarkable skills in philology and comparative literature to present an optimistic view of Western history and culture and to refute any narrow form of nationalism or chauvinism. This expanded Princeton Classics edition of Mimesis includes a substantial introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay in which Auerbach responds to his critics.
East West Mimesis
Author: Kader Konuk
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804775753
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316
Book Description
East West Mimesis follows the plight of German-Jewish humanists who escaped Nazi persecution by seeking exile in a Muslim-dominated society. Kader Konuk asks why philologists like Erich Auerbach found humanism at home in Istanbul at the very moment it was banished from Europe. She challenges the notion of exile as synonymous with intellectual isolation and shows the reciprocal effects of German émigrés on Turkey's humanist reform movement. By making literary critical concepts productive for our understanding of Turkish cultural history, the book provides a new approach to the study of East-West relations. Central to the book is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, written in Istanbul after he fled Germany in 1936. Konuk draws on some of Auerbach's key concepts—figura as a way of conceptualizing history and mimesis as a means of representing reality—to show how Istanbul shaped Mimesis and to understand Turkey's humanist reform movement as a type of cultural mimesis.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804775753
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316
Book Description
East West Mimesis follows the plight of German-Jewish humanists who escaped Nazi persecution by seeking exile in a Muslim-dominated society. Kader Konuk asks why philologists like Erich Auerbach found humanism at home in Istanbul at the very moment it was banished from Europe. She challenges the notion of exile as synonymous with intellectual isolation and shows the reciprocal effects of German émigrés on Turkey's humanist reform movement. By making literary critical concepts productive for our understanding of Turkish cultural history, the book provides a new approach to the study of East-West relations. Central to the book is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, written in Istanbul after he fled Germany in 1936. Konuk draws on some of Auerbach's key concepts—figura as a way of conceptualizing history and mimesis as a means of representing reality—to show how Istanbul shaped Mimesis and to understand Turkey's humanist reform movement as a type of cultural mimesis.
The Fiction of Truth
Author: Carolynn Van Dyke
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501743716
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Book Description
The Fiction of Truth offers a rigorous reexamination of allegory. Rejecting the traditional notion that allegory says thing and means another, Carolynn Van Dyke proposes a new definition of the genre, derived both from contemporary critical theory and from the practice of medieval and Renaissance allegorists. Allegories, Van Dyke asserts, differ from other kinds of narrative in the syntactic rules that seem to generate their plots. Through a reading of Prudentius' Psychomachia, the earliest allegory, Van Dyke formulates a semiotic code that she finds implicit in allegorical works. She shows how allegorists adopted and altered that code in such works as The Romance of the Rose, medieval morality plays, The Pilgrim's Progress, The Divine Comedy, and The Faerie Queene. Her book is both a bold theoretical examination of allegory and a history of its evolution over the twelve centuries during which it played a major—even a dominant—role in Western literature.
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501743716
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Book Description
The Fiction of Truth offers a rigorous reexamination of allegory. Rejecting the traditional notion that allegory says thing and means another, Carolynn Van Dyke proposes a new definition of the genre, derived both from contemporary critical theory and from the practice of medieval and Renaissance allegorists. Allegories, Van Dyke asserts, differ from other kinds of narrative in the syntactic rules that seem to generate their plots. Through a reading of Prudentius' Psychomachia, the earliest allegory, Van Dyke formulates a semiotic code that she finds implicit in allegorical works. She shows how allegorists adopted and altered that code in such works as The Romance of the Rose, medieval morality plays, The Pilgrim's Progress, The Divine Comedy, and The Faerie Queene. Her book is both a bold theoretical examination of allegory and a history of its evolution over the twelve centuries during which it played a major—even a dominant—role in Western literature.
The Legacy of Vico in Modern Cultural History
Author: Joseph Mali
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107025877
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297
Book Description
Joseph Mali shows how modern thinkers were inspired by Vico to create their own theories of human life and history.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107025877
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297
Book Description
Joseph Mali shows how modern thinkers were inspired by Vico to create their own theories of human life and history.
Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith
Author: Gianni Vattimo
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231520417
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 134
Book Description
The debate over the place of religion in secular, democratic societies dominates philosophical and intellectual discourse. These arguments often polarize around simplistic reductions, making efforts at reconciliation impossible. Yet more rational stances do exist, positions that broker a peace between relativism and religion in people's public, private, and ethical lives. Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith advances just such a dialogue, featuring the collaboration of two major philosophers known for their progressive approach to this issue. Seeking unity over difference, Gianni Vattimo and René Girard turn to Max Weber, Eric Auerbach, and Marcel Gauchet, among others, in their exploration of truth and liberty, relativism and faith, and the tensions of a world filled with new forms of religiously inspired violence. Vattimo and Girard ultimately conclude that secularism and the involvement (or lack thereof) of religion in governance are, in essence, produced by Christianity. In other words, Christianity is "the religion of the exit from religion," and democracy, civil rights, the free market, and individual freedoms are all facilitated by Christian culture. Through an exchange that is both intimate and enlightening, Vattimo and Girard share their unparalleled insight into the relationships among religion, modernity, and the role of Christianity, especially as it exists in our multicultural world.
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231520417
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 134
Book Description
The debate over the place of religion in secular, democratic societies dominates philosophical and intellectual discourse. These arguments often polarize around simplistic reductions, making efforts at reconciliation impossible. Yet more rational stances do exist, positions that broker a peace between relativism and religion in people's public, private, and ethical lives. Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith advances just such a dialogue, featuring the collaboration of two major philosophers known for their progressive approach to this issue. Seeking unity over difference, Gianni Vattimo and René Girard turn to Max Weber, Eric Auerbach, and Marcel Gauchet, among others, in their exploration of truth and liberty, relativism and faith, and the tensions of a world filled with new forms of religiously inspired violence. Vattimo and Girard ultimately conclude that secularism and the involvement (or lack thereof) of religion in governance are, in essence, produced by Christianity. In other words, Christianity is "the religion of the exit from religion," and democracy, civil rights, the free market, and individual freedoms are all facilitated by Christian culture. Through an exchange that is both intimate and enlightening, Vattimo and Girard share their unparalleled insight into the relationships among religion, modernity, and the role of Christianity, especially as it exists in our multicultural world.