Erich Auerbach quotes

Erich Auerbach was a German philologist and literary critic, renowned for his work in comparative literature. His most influential book, "Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature," explored the development of realism from antiquity to modern times. He became a pivotal figure in literary studies and shaped modern literary theory. Here are 9 of his quotes:

The concept of God held by the Jews is less a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehending and representing things.

Erich Auerbach

In the Old Testament stories, ... the sublime influence of God here reaches so deeply into the everyday that the two realms of the sublime and the everyday are not only actually unseparated but basically inseparable.

Erich Auerbach

A scene like Peter's denial fits into no antique genre. It is too serious for comedy, too contemporary and everyday for tragedy, politically too insignificant for history-and the form which was given it is one of such immediacy that its like does not exist in the literature of antiquity.

Erich Auerbach

The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is, is more of an individual than the young man; for it is only in the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality.

Erich Auerbach

[It] would have been all the easier [if] the entire story of the scar had been presented as a recollection which awakens in Odysseus' mind at this particular moment. It would have been perfectly easy to do; the story of the scar had only to be inserted two verses earlier, at the first mention of the word scar, where the motifs "Odysseus” and "recollection” were already at hand. But any such subjectivistic‐perspectivistic procedure, creating a foreground and background, resulting in the present lying open to the depths of the past, is entirely foreign to the Homeric style; the Homeric style knows only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present.

Erich Auerbach

The digressions [ in Homer] are not meant to keep the reader in suspense ... An episode that will increase suspense by retarding the action must be so constructed that it will not fill the present entirely, will not put the crisis, whose resolution is being awaited, entirely out of the reader's mind, and thereby destroy the mood of suspense; the crisis and the suspense must continue, must remain vibrant in the background. But Homer-and to this we shall have to return later-knows no background. What he narrates is for the time being the only present, and fills both the stage and the reader's mind completely.

Erich Auerbach

[The Passion story] completely destroys the aesthetics of the separation of styles; it engenders a new elevated style, which does not scorn everyday life and which is ready to absorb the sensory realistic, even the ugly, the undignified, the physically base. Or-if anyone prefers to have it the other way around-a new sermo humilis is born, a low style, such as would properly only be applicable to comedy, but which now reaches out far beyond its original domain, and encroaches upon the deepest and the highest, the sublime and the eternal.

Erich Auerbach

The Scripture stories do not, like Homer's, court our favor, they do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us-they seek to subject us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels.

Erich Auerbach