Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) was a Romance philologist and professor of literature and language. He was born and educated in Germany, and he worked in a German library until he was dismissed in 1929 due to Nazi Party policies against Jews. He taught philology at a German university for a time, but he left his increasingly dangerous nation in 1936, taking a position at the Turkish State University in Istanbul. In 1947 he took a position at Yale University, and he remained in the United States until his death.

Auerbach’s training as a philologist makes him particularly suited to writing such an expansive survey of Western literary history. Romance philology, the study of literatures deriving from Latin, is not the singular study of literary texts but instead includes the study of the many other arenas that influenced literature, including rhetoric, law, history, religion, culture, and language. Many of the ideas underpinning philology were articulated by Wilhelm Dilthey, who argued that “the world of written texts […] belonged to the realm of lived experience (Erlebnis), which the interpreter attempted to recover through a combination of erudition and a subjective intuition (eingefühlen) of what the inner spirit (Geist) of the work was” (xi).