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Review
The compass and the richness of the book can hardly be exaggerated. This is true too of the originality of Mr. Auerbach's critical method which is at once encyclopedic and microscopic, combining the disciplines of philology, literary criticism, and history. -- "The New York Times
One of the most important and readable books in literary criticism of the past 15 years . . . The author, beginning with Homer and the Bible, traces the imitation of life in literature through the ages . . .touching upon every major literary figure in western culture on the way. -- "Publishers Weekly
One of the great works of literary scholarship. . . . Auerbach's method . . . is to fasten with fastidious sensitivity on some stray phrase or passage in order to unpack from it a wealth of historical insight. It is his combination of scholarly erudition and critical astuteness which is most remarkable. -- Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books
Written with the authority that comes from deep learning and full of information worth knowing. Princeton's 50th anniversary edition of Mimesis has an introduction by the late literary and cultural critic Edward Said that by itself is worth the price of the book. It's the only preface I know of that I wish were longer, serving as both an analysis of Auerbach and a ramework placing him in his scholarly and historical context. . . . Princeton's reissue of Mimesis is both timely and symbolic. -- Guy Davenport, Los Angeles Times Book Review
[Mimesis] offers not just an eminent reading of the Western canon, but a mighty lesson on how to write. . . . I don't think a more significant or useful book of criticism has been written in the half-century since Mimesis was published. What's more, I can't imagine that anything like it will ever be written again. . . . [In] producing such a rich, strong book on how to read, Auerbach composed a virtual manual on how to write, one I've referred back to again and again since the day, almost two decades ago, when I first happened upon it. -- Jim Lewis, Slate Magazine
One of the most important and readable books in literary criticism of the past 15 years . . . The author, beginning with Homer and the Bible, traces the imitation of life in literature through the ages . . .touching upon every major literary figure in western culture on the way. -- "Publishers Weekly
One of the great works of literary scholarship. . . . Auerbach's method . . . is to fasten with fastidious sensitivity on some stray phrase or passage in order to unpack from it a wealth of historical insight. It is his combination of scholarly erudition and critical astuteness which is most remarkable. -- Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books
Written with the authority that comes from deep learning and full of information worth knowing. Princeton's 50th anniversary edition of Mimesis has an introduction by the late literary and cultural critic Edward Said that by itself is worth the price of the book. It's the only preface I know of that I wish were longer, serving as both an analysis of Auerbach and a ramework placing him in his scholarly and historical context. . . . Princeton's reissue of Mimesis is both timely and symbolic. -- Guy Davenport, Los Angeles Times Book Review
[Mimesis] offers not just an eminent reading of the Western canon, but a mighty lesson on how to write. . . . I don't think a more significant or useful book of criticism has been written in the half-century since Mimesis was published. What's more, I can't imagine that anything like it will ever be written again. . . . [In] producing such a rich, strong book on how to read, Auerbach composed a virtual manual on how to write, one I've referred back to again and again since the day, almost two decades ago, when I first happened upon it. -- Jim Lewis, Slate Magazine
Product Description
A half-century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis still stands as a monumental achievement in 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.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
You simply cannot be a literary critic without reading this,
By
This review is from: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Paperback)
To paraphrase JOhn Lennon: evereybody's talking about Marxism and Modernism, Structuralism and sociologism, this-ism and that-ism; all I am saying, is give the narrative a chance. That is really what this greatest critic of all time - a man who is to literary criticism what Beethoven is to music, or Tocqueville to history, or Shakespeare to English poetry - ever did. Only he armed himselv with such a broad and wide-ranging array of different interpretative approaches, that he was always able to extract more, and more diverse, meanings, from any significant passage; and that not by illegitimately stretching the content to cover areas the writer had never conceived of, but simply by bringing out what already was there. His account of a passage in Ammianus Marcellinus, for instance, ought to be read by every historian of the late Roman Empire to understand what really was happening to that ancient civilization in the fourth century; as should his reading of a short story by Boccaccio (together, I would say, with Chesterton's magnificent essay on Chaucer) to understand the spirit that was awakening at the height of the Middle Ages. And this book is just as broad as it is sharp; just as it manages to pierce to the very heart of a single well-chosen subject, so too it covers the most extraordinary range of subjects, from the beginning of our culture (Homer and the book of Genesis) to high modernity (Proust), from the obscure (a stunning review of a bloody sixth-century anecdote by Gregory bishop of Tours) to the famous (Shakespeare). It is the finest book of literary criticism and history ever written, not only on account of its keen penetration and insight, but also of its enormous and wide-ranging learning, that allows the reader access to almost every century and every area of our Western heritage.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mimesis as form,
By Suckwoo Lee (Seoul, Seoul South Korea) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Mimesis (Paperback)
Others reviewd this legendary book already. But I have a point to tell: Mimesis not as content but as form. Mimesis, the title of the book comes from latin word, reflection. Traditionary, mimesis is used to analyse the content of text. You can see that kind of approach in Arnold Hauser's 4 volumes of 'The Social History of Art' or Lukacs's aesthetic theory. But that kind of approach mainly inspired by Marxism went out of mode. Alternative approach is the one of Adorno's 'sociology of art'. Adorno's analysis of music is distinct. He insisted that we could detect the totality of society not in content but in the form of text. He himself is the composer and pupil of Schonberg. So he advocated Modernism in this light. At first glance, Modernism could not match to Marxism. But persausively, Adorno showed the opposite case. You can see that kind of approach in the textof Frederic Jameson's 'Marxism and Form'.Auerbach's approach should be captured in this line. He analysed various Western literary text in the light of form and the social structuer of that time. His point is that we could detect the social structure of that time or totality, in the term of Marxist tradition, not only in content but also in form, or in Auerbach's term, style.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Representing Reality,
By
This review is from: Mimesis (Paperback)
Beginning with episodes in Homer and the Bible, this amazing study concludes by analyzing passages in Woolf and Proust. To echo Rene Wellek's assessment: it is a book of such scope and depth....it combines so many methods so skillfully, it raises so many questions of theory, history and criticism, it displays so much erudition, insight and wisdom.... I returned to this book after being out of graduate school for twenty years (where it was already out of fashion in most English departments but read with care by all students of Comparative literature), and it is so much better this time around. The essay on Fortuna continues to resonate with timely warnings, and what I once admired about "Odysseus' Scar" is even more luminous after my recent rereading of the book.
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