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Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) | |
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German philologist, educator, critic, and literary historian. Auerbach's famous account of the genesis of the novel, Mimesis (1946), has been since its appearance one the most widely read scholarly works on literary history and criticism. René Wellek, Auerbach's colleague at Yale University, wrote: "The work is a strikingly successful combination of philology, stylistics, history of ideas and sociology, of meticulous learning and artistic taste, of historical imagination and awareness of our own age." (from A History of Modern Criticism 1970-1950, Volume 7, 1991) "He who represents the course of a human life, or a sequence of events extending over a prolonged period of time, and represents it from beginning to end, must prune and isolate arbitrary. Life has always long since begun, and it is always still going on. And the people whose story the author is telling experience much more than he can ever hope to tell. But the things that happen to a few individuals in the course of a few minutes, hours, possibly even days - these one can hope to report with reasonable completeness." (Auerbach in Mimesis) Erich Auerbach was born in Berlin into a upper-middle class Jewish family. He studied at the universities of Berlin, Freiburg, and Munich. In 1913 Auerbach received a Doctor of Law degree from the University of Heidelberg. During World War I he served in in the German army. After the war Auerbach changed disciplines and earned his doctorate in Romance philology from the University of Greifswald in 1921. His dissertation was entitled Zur Technik der Frührenaissancenovelle in Italien und Frankreich. Between the years 1923 and 1929 Auerbach served as a librarian of the Prussian State Library in Berlin. After that he was professor of Romance philology at the University of Marburg. In Marburg Auerbach gained recognition with his work Dante, Poet of the Secular World (1929). After Hitler was elected chancellor of German in 1933, a law was passed which would make impossible for Jews to hold official positions. Aurbach was dismissed by the Nazis in 1935 and he went to Istanbul where he taught at the Istanbul State University. During his years in Turkey Auerbach wrote his famous work, Mimesis, which was first published in German in 1946 and seven years later in English. In Istanbul Auerbach did not have access to all the literature he needed and the libraries were not well equipped for European studies. "On the other hand it is quite possible that the book owes its existence to just this lack of a rich and specialized library. It had been possible for me to acquaint myself with all the work that has been done on so many subjects, I might never have reached the point of writing." Two smaller studies dating from this period appeared in Finland in the journal Neuphilologische Mitteilungen. In 1947 Auerbach moved to the United States. He was a teacher at Pennsylvania State University and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1949-50 before he was appointed Professor of Romance philology at Yale University. Auerbach died in Wallingford, Connecticut, on October 13, 1957. In Mimesis Auerbach examined changing conceptions of reality as they are reflected in literary works. The word "mimesis" has almost the same meaning as "mime," but is broadly translated as "imitation." Auerbach starts from Homer and continues throught the texts of Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, etc. ending with such writers as Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf. Often he first focuses on stylistic analysis and interpretations of meaning, and from these comments he moves to broader observations on social history and culture. Although Auerbach analyzes writers' attitudes toward reality, he does not rush to give the reader his own definition of the concept "realism." Auerbach's idea is to approach the subject from different points of view, through writers and a selection of excerpts from wide variety of texts, mostly from France and Italy. From Scandinavian writers Ibsen is settled with a few sentences and about Russian realism Auerbach writes: "...remembering it came into its own only during the nineteenth century and indeed only during the second half of it, we cannot escape the observation that it is based on a Christian and traditionally patriarchal concept of the creatural dignity of every human being regardless of social rank and position, and hence that it is fundamentally related to old-Christian than to modern occidental realism. The enlightened, active bourgeoisie, with its assumption of economic and intellectual leadership, which everywhere else underlay modern culture in general and modern realism in particular, seems to have scarcely existed in Russia." According to Auerbach, Stendhal and Balzac broke the rigid separation of stylistic levels, dating from classical antiquity, in which the low, comic mode was reserved for the description of ordinary, everyday reality, and tragic, the problematic, the serious within everyday life was depicted in the high style. But before these French writers, who did not separate the serious and the realistic, the unification of styles was seen in Dante's Commedia. Christ's passion, in which the low and the sublime were combined, broke down the hierarchical rules of literary depiction for the first time. Modern realistic view of the world was fully developed in the character of Julien Sorel from Stendhal's novel The Red and the Black (1830) - Sorel's tragic life is deeply connected with the historical, social, and political conditions of the period. René Wellek has criticized that Auerbach's concept of realism is contradictory: "... the early examples of the uses of realism are quite different from those he uses in the later sections on Stendhal, Balzac, and the Goncourts. He uses the term realism in the book in the most diverse manner, yet still always referring to the "represented reality." (from A History of Modern Criticism 1970-1950, Volume 7) Also the concept of mimesis has been defined in many ways in contemporary aesthetics, referring sometimes to the inner world of consciousness. Against the view of the novel as a realistic representation of human experience, structuralists and deconstructionists have emphasized the self-referentiality of all literature. For further reading: Literary History and the Challenge of Philology, edited by Seth Lerer (1996); A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950: Volume 7, by René Wellek (1991); Literary Criticism and the Structures of History by G. Green (1982) - For further information: Erich Auerbach's Mimesis by William Calin - Selected works:
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