Download or read book Erich Auerbach and the Secular World written by Jon Nixon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-05-18 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Auerbach was one of the foremost literary critics of the 20th century whose work has relevance within the fields of literary criticism, historiography and postcolonial theory. The opening chapter of this book explains how he understood the task of interpretation and his role as an interpreter. The following chapter outlines the important phases in his life with reference to the writers and thinkers who influenced him in his thinking and practice. The central chapters of the book focus on specific themes in his work: the historical grounding of the ‘figural’ imagination; the relation between the secular and the sacred; the emergence of tragic realism; and the notion of ‘inner history’ as a defining feature of early 20th-cenntury modernism. The final two chapters focus on broader issues relating to the development of Auerbach’s understanding of the development of an educated readership within Europe and of his concerns regarding the emergence of what he terms ‘a world literature’.
Download or read book Dante written by Erich Auerbach and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2007-01-16 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Erich Auerbach’s Dante: Poet of the Secular World is an inspiring introduction to one of world’s greatest poets as well as a brilliantly argued and still provocative essay in the history of ideas. Here Auerbach, thought by many to be the greatest of twentieth-century scholar-critics, makes the seemingly paradoxical claim that it is in the poetry of Dante, supreme among religious poets, and above all in the stanzas of his Divine Comedy, that the secular world of the modern novel first took imaginative form. Auerbach’s study of Dante, a precursor and necessary complement to Mimesis, his magisterial overview of realism in Western literature, illuminates both the overall structure and the individual detail of Dante’s work, showing it to be an extraordinary synthesis of the sensuous and the conceptual, the particular and the universal, that redefined notions of human character and fate and opened the way into modernity. CONTENTS I. Historical Introduction; The Idea of Man in Literature II. Dante's Early Poetry III. The Subject of the "Comedy" IV. The Structure of the "Comedy" V. The Presentation VI. The Survival and Transformation of Dante's Vision of Reality Notes Index
Download or read book Time History and Literature written by Erich Auerbach and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Important essays from one of the giants of literary criticism, including a dozen published here in English for the first time Erich Auerbach (1892-1957), best known for his classic literary study Mimesis, is celebrated today as a founder of comparative literature, a forerunner of secular criticism, and a prophet of global literary studies. Yet the true depth of Auerbach's thinking and writing remains unplumbed. Time, History, and Literature presents a wide selection of Auerbach's essays, many of which are little known outside the German-speaking world. Of the twenty essays culled for this volume from the full length of his career, twelve have never appeared in English before, and one is being published for the first time. Foregrounded in this major new collection are Auerbach's complex relationship to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, his philosophy of time and history, and his theory of human ethics and responsible action. Auerbach effectively charts out the difficult discovery, in the wake of Christianity, of the sensuous, the earthly, and the human and social worlds. A number of the essays reflect Auerbach's responses to an increasingly hostile National Socialist environment. These writings offer a challenging model of intellectual engagement, one that remains as compelling today as it was in Auerbach's own time.
Download or read book Mimesis written by Erich Auerbach and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Scenes from the Drama of European Literature written by Erich Auerbach and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scenes from the Drama of European Literature was first published in 1984. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In his foreword to this reprint of Erich Auerbach's major essays, Paolo Valesio pays tribute to the author with an old saying that he feels is still the best metaphor for the genesis of a literary critic: the critic is born of the marriage of Mercury and Philology. The German-born Auerbach was a scholar who specialized in Romance philology, a tradition rooted in German historicism—the conviction that works of art must be judged as products of variable places and times, not from the eye of eternity, nor by a single unchanging aesthetic standard. The mercurial element in Auerbach's work is significant, for in a life of motion—of exile from Hitler's Germany—he came to believe that literary history was evolutionary, ever-changing—a view reflected in the title of his book, which suggests life and literature are historical drama. Auerbach is best known for his magisterial study Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, written during the war, in Istanbul, when he was far from his own culture and from the books that he normally relied on. In 1957, just before his death, he arranged for the publication in English of his six most important essays, in a volume called Scenes from the Drama of European Literature.As in Mimesis,Auerbach's fresh insights bring to the disparate subjects of the essays a coherence that reflects the unity of Western, humanistic tradition, even while they hint at the deepening pessimism of his later years. In the first essay, "Figura," Auerbach develops his concept of the figural interpretation of reality; applied here to Dante's Divine Comedy,it also served as groundwork for his treatment of realism in Mimesis. A second essay on Dante's examines the poet's depiction of St. Francis of Assisi. The next three essays deal with the paradoxical nature of Pascal's political thought; the merging of la cour and la ville—the king's entourage and the bourgeoisie—chiefly in relation to the seventeenth-century French theater; and Vico's formulation concepts by the German Romantics. In the final essay Auerbach confers upon Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal the designation "aesthetic dignity" because, not in spite of, the hideous reality of the peoms. "A major collection of important essays on European literature, almost all classics, and almost all required reading for their various centuries—thus the book is indispensable for the medieval period,the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries; in addition, the 'Figura' and the Vico essays are very significant theoretical statements. The book is lucid and far more accessible for undergraduates than, say, current high theory. Nor has Auerbach's own work aged . . . All of his varied strengths are evidence in this collection, which is a better way into his work than Mimesis." –Fredric Jameson, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Download or read book Mimesis written by Erich Auerbach and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-06 with total page 614 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic book that has taught generations how to read Western literature More than half a century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis remains a masterpiece of literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depict reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. A German Jew who was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935, Auerbach left for Turkey, where he taught in Istanbul. There he wrote Mimesis, publishing it in German after the war. Displaced as he was, Auerbach produced a work of great erudition that contains no footnotes, basing his arguments instead on searching, illuminating readings of key passages from his primary texts. His aim was to show how, from antiquity to modernity, literature progresses toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. Ranging over works in Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English, Auerbach uses his remarkable skills in philology and comparative literature to present an optimistic view of Western history and culture and to refute any narrow form of nationalism or chauvinism. This expanded Princeton Classics edition of Mimesis includes a substantial introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay in which Auerbach responds to his critics.
Download or read book East West Mimesis written by Kader Konuk and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-21 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: East West Mimesis follows the plight of German-Jewish humanists who escaped Nazi persecution by seeking exile in a Muslim-dominated society. Kader Konuk asks why philologists like Erich Auerbach found humanism at home in Istanbul at the very moment it was banished from Europe. She challenges the notion of exile as synonymous with intellectual isolation and shows the reciprocal effects of German émigrés on Turkey's humanist reform movement. By making literary critical concepts productive for our understanding of Turkish cultural history, the book provides a new approach to the study of East-West relations. Central to the book is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, written in Istanbul after he fled Germany in 1936. Konuk draws on some of Auerbach's key concepts—figura as a way of conceptualizing history and mimesis as a means of representing reality—to show how Istanbul shaped Mimesis and to understand Turkey's humanist reform movement as a type of cultural mimesis.
Download or read book Updike and Politics written by Matthew Shipe and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting the first interdisciplinary consideration of his political thought, Updike and Politics: New Considerations establishes a new scholarly foundation for assessing one of the most recognized and significant American writers of the post-1945 period. This book brings together a diverse group of American and international scholars, including contributors from Japan, India, Israel, and Europe. Like Updike himself, the collection canvases a wide range of topics, including Updike’s too often overlooked poetry and his single play. Its essays deal with not only political themes such as the traditional aspects of power, rights, equality, justice, or violence but also the more divisive elements in Updike’s work like race, gender, imperialism, hegemony, and technology. Ultimately, the book reveals how Updike’s immense body of work illuminates the central political questions and problems that troubled American culture during the second half of the twentieth century as well as the opening decade of the new millennium.
Download or read book The Fiction of Truth written by Carolynn Van Dyke and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-30 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fiction of Truth offers a rigorous reexamination of allegory. Rejecting the traditional notion that allegory says thing and means another, Carolynn Van Dyke proposes a new definition of the genre, derived both from contemporary critical theory and from the practice of medieval and Renaissance allegorists. Allegories, Van Dyke asserts, differ from other kinds of narrative in the syntactic rules that seem to generate their plots. Through a reading of Prudentius' Psychomachia, the earliest allegory, Van Dyke formulates a semiotic code that she finds implicit in allegorical works. She shows how allegorists adopted and altered that code in such works as The Romance of the Rose, medieval morality plays, The Pilgrim's Progress, The Divine Comedy, and The Faerie Queene. Her book is both a bold theoretical examination of allegory and a history of its evolution over the twelve centuries during which it played a major—even a dominant—role in Western literature.
Download or read book The Politics of Sincerity written by Elizabeth Markovits and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A growing frustration with “spin doctors,” doublespeak, and outright lying by public officials has resulted in a deep public cynicism regarding politics today. It has also led many voters to seek out politicians who engage in “straight talk,” out of a hope that sincerity signifies a dedication to the truth. While this is an understandable reaction to the degradation of public discourse inflicted by political hype, Elizabeth Markovits argues that the search for sincerity in the public arena actually constitutes a dangerous distraction from more important concerns, including factual truth and the ethical import of political statements. Her argument takes her back to an examination of the Greek notion of parrhesia (frank speech), and she draws from her study of the Platonic dialogues a nuanced understanding of this ancient analogue of “straight talk.” She shows Plato to have an appreciation for rhetoric rather than a desire to purge it from public life, providing insights into the ways it can contribute to a fruitful form of deliberative democracy today.
Download or read book Moments of Negotiation written by Jürgen Pieters and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moments of Negotiation offers the first book-length and indepth analysis of the New Historicist reading method, which the American Shakespeare-scholar Stephen Greenblatt introduced at the beginning of the 1980s. Ever since, Greenblatt has been hailed as the prime representative of this movement, whose critical acclaim has been one of the dominant trends in recent literary and cultural studies. In this new book, Jürgen Pieters attempts to fill a remarkable lacuna in the critical reception of Greenblatt's work. The book's aim is to provide a thorough analysis of the theoretical background of Greenblatt's method. This involves not only a close reading of Greenblatt's sources—the book offers introductory surveys of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, Michel de Certeau, Jean-François Lyotard, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall—but also a critique of the way in which he adapts and transforms their original insights in the framework of his own interdisciplinary method. This book is of interest to students and scholars coming from a diverse range of fields: literary theory, cultural history, early modern studies, Shakespeare studies,theory and practice of history.
Download or read book Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science written by Michael Golston and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007-12-21 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the half-century between 1890 and 1950, a variety of fields and disciplines, from musicology and literary studies to biology, psychology, genetics, and eugenics, expressed a profound interest in the subject of rhythm. In this book, Michael Golston recovers much of the work done in this area and situates it in the society, politics, and culture of the Modernist period. He then filters selected Modernist poems through this archive to demonstrate that innovations in prosody, form, and subject matter are based on a largely forgotten ideology of rhythm and that beneath Modernist prosody is a science and an accompanying technology. In his analysis, Golston first examines psychological and physiological experiments that purportedly proved that races responded differently to rhythmic stimuli. He then demonstrates how poets like Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Mina Loy, and William Carlos Williams either absorbed or echoed the information in these studies, using it to hone the innovative edge of Modernist practice and fundamentally alter the way poetry was written. Golston performs close readings of canonical texts such as Pound's Cantos, Yeats's "Lake Isle of Innisfree," and William Carlos Williams's Paterson, and examines the role the sciences of rhythm played in racist discourses and fascist political thinking in the years leading up to World War II. Recovering obscure texts written in France, Germany, England, and America, Golston argues that "Rhythmics" was instrumental in generating an international modern art and should become a major consideration in our reading of reactionary avant-garde poetry.
Download or read book The Art and Thought of John La Farge written by Katie Kresser and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Art and Thought of John La Farge offers an unprecedented portrait of one of the most celebrated artists of the Gilded Age and opens a window onto nineteenth-century American culture. The book reveals how the work of John La Farge contributed to a rich philosophical dialogue concerning the trustworthiness of human perception. In his struggle against a 'common truth' of iconic symbols presented by a new mass visual culture, La Farge developed a subversive approach to visual representation that focused attention not on the artwork itself, but on the complex, real encounter of artist, subject and medium from which the artwork came.
Download or read book Approaches to World Literature written by Joachim Küpper and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-12-20 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume introduces new considerations on the topic of “World Literature”, penned by leading representatives of the discipline from the United States, India, Japan, the Middle East, England, France and Germany. The essays revolve around the question of what, specifically in today's rapidly globalizing world, may be the productive implications of the concept of World Literature, which was first developed in the 18th century and then elaborated on by Goethe. The discussions include problems such as different script systems with varying literary functions, as well as questions addressing the relationship between ethnic self-description and cultural belonging. The contributions result from a conference that took place at the Dahlem Humanities Center, Freie Universität Berlin, in 2012.
Download or read book Bronze by Gold written by Sebastian D.G. Knowles and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to this volume investigate several themes about music's relationship to the literary compositions of James Joyce: music as a condition to which Joyce aspired; music theory as a useful way of reading his works; and musical compositions inspired by or connected with him.
Download or read book The Legacy of Vico in Modern Cultural History written by Joseph Mali and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-06 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joseph Mali shows how modern thinkers were inspired by Vico to create their own theories of human life and history.
Download or read book The World the Text and the Critic written by Edward W. Said and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1983 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Said demonstrates that critical discourse has been strengthened by the writings of Derrida and Foucault and by influences like Marxism, structuralism, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. But, he argues, these forces have compelled literature to meet the requirements of a theory or system, ignoring complex affiliations binding the texts to the world.
