Erich Auerbach

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Erich Auerbach (November 9, 1892 in Berlin - October 13, 1957 in Wallingford, Connecticut) was a German-Jewish philologist and comparative scholar and critic of literature. His best-known work is Mimesis, a history of representation in Western literature from ancient to modern times.

Auerbach was trained in the German philological tradition and would eventually become, along with Leo Spitzer, one of its best-known scholars. After participating as combatant in World War I, he earned a doctorate in 1921 and in 1929 became a member of the philology faculty at the University of Marburg, publishing a well-received study entitled Dante: Poet of the Secular World. With the rise of the National Socialism, however, Auerbach, was forced to vacate his position in 1935. Exiled from Germany, he took up residence in Istanbul, Turkey, where he wrote Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, generally considered his masterwork.

He later moved to the United States in 1947, teaching at Pennsylvania State University and then working at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University; finally he was made a Professor of Romance philology at Yale University in 1950, a position he held until his death in 1957. While there he supervised Frederic Jameson's doctoral work.

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Works

Dante: Poet of the Secular World. ISBN 0226032051.
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. ISBN 069111336X.
Literary Language and Its Public (German edition 1958)

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