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Title: Mimesis : The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Erich Auerbach, Willard Trask ISBN: 0-691-11336-X Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 07 April, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.83 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: You simply cannot be a literary critic without reading this
Comment: To paraphrase JOhn Lennon: evereybody's talking about Marxism and Modernism, Structuralism and sociologism, this-ism and that-ism; all I am saying, is give the narrative a chance. That is really what this greatest critic of all time - a man who is to literary criticism what Beethoven is to music, or Tocqueville to history, or Shakespeare to English poetry - ever did. Only he armed himselv with such a broad and wide-ranging array of different interpretative approaches, that he was always able to extract more, and more diverse, meanings, from any significant passage; and that not by illegitimately stretching the content to cover areas the writer had never conceived of, but simply by bringing out what already was there. His account of a passage in Ammianus Marcellinus, for instance, ought to be read by every historian of the late Roman Empire to understand what really was happening to that ancient civilization in the fourth century; as should his reading of a short story by Boccaccio (together, I would say, with Chesterton's magnificent essay on Chaucer) to understand the spirit that was awakening at the height of the Middle Ages. And this book is just as broad as it is sharp; just as it manages to pierce to the very heart of a single well-chosen subject, so too it covers the most extraordinary range of subjects, from the beginning of our culture (Homer and the book of Genesis) to high modernity (Proust), from the obscure (a stunning review of a bloody sixth-century anecdote by Gregory bishop of Tours) to the famous (Shakespeare). It is the finest book of literary criticism and history ever written, not only on account of its keen penetration and insight, but also of its enormous and wide-ranging learning, that allows the reader access to almost every century and every area of our Western heritage.
Rating: 5
Summary: Mimesis as form
Comment: Others reviewd this legendary book already. But I have a point to tell: Mimesis not as content but as form. Mimesis, the title of the book comes from latin word, reflection. Traditionary, mimesis is used to analyse the content of text. You can see that kind of approach in Arnold Hauser's 4 volumes of 'The Social History of Art' or Lukacs's aesthetic theory. But that kind of approach mainly inspired by Marxism went out of mode. Alternative approach is the one of Adorno's 'sociology of art'. Adorno's analysis of music is distinct. He insisted that we could detect the totality of society not in content but in the form of text. He himself is the composer and pupil of Schonberg. So he advocated Modernism in this light. At first glance, Modernism could not match to Marxism. But persausively, Adorno showed the opposite case. You can see that kind of approach in the textof Frederic Jameson's 'Marxism and Form'.
Auerbach's approach should be captured in this line. He analysed various Western literary text in the light of form and the social structuer of that time. His point is that we could detect the social structure of that time or totality, in the term of Marxist tradition, not only in content but also in form, or in Auerbach's term, style.
Rating: 5
Summary: Representing Reality
Comment: Beginning with episodes in Homer and the Bible, this amazing study concludes by analyzing passages in Woolf and Proust. To echo Rene Wellek's assessment: it is a book of such scope and depth....it combines so many methods so skillfully, it raises so many questions of theory, history and criticism, it displays so much erudition, insight and wisdom.... I returned to this book after being out of graduate school for twenty years (where it was already out of fashion in most English departments but read with care by all students of Comparative literature), and it is so much better this time around. The essay on Fortuna continues to resonate with timely warnings, and what I once admired about "Odysseus' Scar" is even more luminous after my recent rereading of the book.
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Title: Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. by Northrop Frye ISBN: 0691069999 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 25 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages by Erich Auerbach, Ralph Manheim ISBN: 0691024685 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 17 May, 1993 List Price(USD): $32.00 |
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Title: The Dialogic Imagination : Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, Michael Holquist, Vadim Liapunov, Kenneth Brostrom ISBN: 029271534X Publisher: Univ of Texas Press Pub. Date: 1982 List Price(USD): $17.44 |
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Title: European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages by Ernst Robert Curtius, Willard Trask ISBN: 0691018995 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 February, 1991 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, Edith Grossman, Harold Bloom ISBN: 0060188707 Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: 21 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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