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“... verge of the promised land. Biblical style is famous for its stony reticence, for a mimesis that Erich Auerbach called ‘fraught with background’. This reticence is surely not as unique as Auerbach claimed – Herodotus is a great rationer of explanation, for example – but it achieves its best-known form in the ...”

“... for a ‘serener time’ associated with the ‘intuitive synthesis’ of great philologists like Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer and Dilthey, or his longing for the heroic age of public intellectuals like Fanon. When Said contrasts two generations of de-colonising criticism – the ‘modernist’ figures of C.L.R. James (The Black Jacobins) and George ...”

“... Spinoza or the Fellows of the Royal Society? Yet it is this in Vico that so deeply fascinated Erich Auerbach, one of the great literary scholars of our time. Of this, Professor Aarsleff says not a word. Yet it is in asking questions such as these, and in suggesting how solutions might be obtained (however fancifully at times), that Vico’s ...”

“... More relevant by far would be a comparison with Lukács’s contemporaries, Ernst Robert Curtius, Erich Auerbach and Arnoldo Momigliano, who did more for the survival of the values to which he paid lip-service than it was in his intention or in his power to do. There is no mention of these names in the present biography, which is just as ...”

“... failed the test of paternal love. Caravaggio’s Isaac howls with his face pressed to the altar. Erich Auerbach gave the story’s elliptical silence, ‘fraught with background’, a fundamental place in the genealogy of Western literature. The greatest modern response – an antithesis to Kant – was Kierkegaard’s, for whom the ethically impossible ...”

“... like Leo Spitzer tried to psyche out the ‘spiritual etymon’ of each writer. Or that Erich Auerbach valued historicism, and the variety of perspectives it introduced, as a Western heritage it would be tragic to lose and which had enabled him to construct the colourful narrative of Mimesis. De Man, in the TLS symposium, was composing a little ...”

“... Bourdieu or Michel Foucault; at other moments, his centuries-wide learning evokes the tradition of Erich Auerbach or Ernst Robert Curtius; and at still other times he takes his place alongside major contemporary scholars of American education and society such as Laurence Veysey, David Hollinger and Gerald Graff. Guillory opens with a respectful nod to ...”

“... Erich Auerbach’s celebrated study of the representation of reality in Western literature, Mimesis, was published in German in 1946. Grounded on the analysis (mainly syntactic) of passages selected from texts in some nine different languages, ranging from Homer and the Old Testament to Virginia Woolf, it assumes throughout that reality has an objective existence, is open to perception, and needs no apologetic inverted commas ...”

“... all his fondness for the rhetoric of particularity over that of grand narrative, approvingly cites Erich Auerbach’s idea of the part as leading to a felt sense of the existential whole. For Greenblatt, this is what an anecdote does; it is a device offering ‘representational plenitude’. At the same time, his suspicion of any claim to other sorts of ...”

“... of all such translations is Daumier’s painting of the two adventurers. Recent responses include Erich Auerbach’s chapter in Mimesis, where a historically scrupulous reading of the text is attempted, and that free translation of Cervantes which accompanies a search for symbolic meanings is reproved. No sancta simplicitas or praise of folly is detected ...”

“... the editors identifies the turning-point in Biblical studies which has made their work possible: Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946). ‘The first chapters, comparing Old Testament narrative with Homeric narrative and meditating on the unique relation of ordinary-language realism to high “figural” meanings in the Gospels, not only offered new ...”

“... the soul, as novelists like Austen became sensitive interpreters of the accidental. One thinks of Erich Auerbach’s magisterial Mimesis, a book which records the literary triumph of the popular, plebeian and everyday over the noble, mythical and heroic. The latter traits were much in favour with Fascism, from which ...”

“... of, the more fanfare had to be made out of it. Observing Kemalist cultural policies in 1936-37, Erich Auerbach wrote from Istanbul to Walter Benjamin: ‘the process is going fantastically and spookily fast: already there is hardly anyone who knows Arabic or Persian, and even Turkish texts of the past century will quickly become ...”

“... to other, no less sophisticated but sometimes less well-informed readers. He liked to quote Erich Auerbach’s assertion that in reading literature we need an ‘empirical confidence in our spontaneous faculty for understanding others on the basis of our own experience’. As all this suggests, Watt didn’t go in for grand methodological ...”