Erich Auerbach's Critical Theory and Practice: An Assessment

Abstract

In the course of his introduction to his last, and perhaps greatest book, Literary Language and its Public in late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, Erich Auerbach refers to Vico's conception of the total phenomenon of history as an eternal Platonic state in spite of constant change displayed by the historic process. If one were to seek a phrase to describe the contours and perspectives of Auerbach's accomplishments as a philologist and critic, Vico's metaphor yields a clue. Early and late, Auerbach's work is permeated by a genial, though limited, set of ideas on literary process which serve to illuminate and explain a kaleidoscopic variety of literary phenomena. His republic of letters is a Platonic state, in which the multiplicity of appearances, the flux of languages, styles, and texts is, through Auerbach's skill, continually made relevant to structures of ideas which, by dint of serving in many instances to show order in diversity, help define the nature of historic process. Any attempt to seize upon and describe Auerbach's set of structures, as they illuminate his work with literature, would send one to the Epilogue of Mimesis. For it is here that we find a kind of genetic development for three of these: From an apposition of Plato's ranking mimesis as third after truth, in Book 10 of The Republic with Dante's assertion that in the Commedia he presented true reality, and from a keeping in mind of this apposition as he proceeded to a wide study of the interpretation of human events in European literature, Auerbach states having crystallized