Erich Auerbach Libri

In questo saggio del 1952 lo studioso Auerbach – e il letterato, e lo scrittore – sente l’esigenza di cimentarsi con la nozione goethiana di “Weltliteratur”: parola magica e figura mitica a un tempo. Qui la "letteratura mondiale", di cui l'Auerbach si costituisce filologo, facendo tesoro della precedente esperienza di romanista, si correla alla (e dipende dalla) “storia mondiale”, in quegli anni determinata e sconvolta dalle guerre che scandirono la prima metà del secolo, assumendo cosí valore portante di ricerca, di sforzo ermeneutico, perché, – come afferma l'autore con una frase lapidaria, semplice e ardita – “le cose stesse devono farsi linguaggio”.

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.

In this, his final book, Erich Auerbach writes, "My purpose is always to write history." Tracing the transformations of classical Latin rhetoric from late antiquity to the modern era, he explores major concerns raised in his Mimesis: the historical and social contexts in which writings were received, and issues of aesthetics, semantics, stylistics, and sociology that anticipate the concerns of the new historicism.In this, his final book, Erich Auerbach writes, "My purpose is always to write history." Tracing the transformations of classical Latin rhetoric from late antiquity to the modern era, he explores major concerns raised in his Mimesis: the historical and social contexts in which writings were received, and issues of aesthetics, semantics, stylistics, and sociology that anticipate the concerns of the new historicism.

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.

Erich Auerbach’s 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.CONTENTSI. Historical Introduction; The Idea of Man in LiteratureII. Dante's Early PoetryIII. The Subject of the "Comedy"IV. The Structure of the "Comedy"V. The PresentationVI. The Survival and Transformation of Dante's Vision of RealityNotesIndex