2016 - 2017

0621-7035-01
  History and Literature: Reading Erich Auerbach's Mimesis                                             
FACULTY OF HUMANITIES
Prof. Joseph MaliGilman-humanities320Wed1200-1400 Sem  2
 
 
University credit hours:  2.0

Course description
Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) was a German-Jewish scholar of Romance languages and literatures. During his years of exile in Istanbul, he composed there his masterpiece Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature – a book that, to this day, is largely considered to be the greatest work of literary history and theory ever written. The twenty chapters that make up Mimesis recount the whole history of Western literature from its inception in Biblical and classical antiquity up to the twentieth century through meticulous philological and philosophical expositions of some representative literary texts, typical to the epochs in which they were written. Auerbach's attention to the specific political, socio-economical, and other historical conditions in which these (and all other) literary works had been composed, and his ability to decipher in and through these works the deeper theological and metaphysical sentiments of historical communities, render his book essential to modern historical scholarship.
In the seminar we shall read Mimesis – each week concentrating on a different chosen chapter – aiming to reassess its unique contribution to modern cultural history.

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