Erich Auerbach

Auerbach, who was Jewish and born in Berlin, was trained in the German philological tradition and eventually became, along with Leo Spitzer, one of its best-known scholars. After participating as a combatant in World War I, he earned a doctorate in 1921 at the University of Greifswald, served as librarian at the Prussian State Library for some years, He was chair of the faculty for Western languages and literatures at Istanbul University from 1936 to 1947. Auerbach moved to the United States in 1947, teaching at Pennsylvania State University and then working at the Institute for Advanced Study. He was appointed professor of Romance philology at Yale University in 1950, a position he held until his death in 1957 in Wallingford, Connecticut. While at Yale, Auerbach was one of Fredric Jameson's teachers. ==Reception==

In the 50-year commemoration reprinting of Auerbach's Mimesis, Edward Said of Columbia University included an extended introduction to Auerbach and mentioned the book's debt to Giambattista Vico, writing: "As one can immediately judge by its subtitle, Auerbach's book is by far the largest in scope and ambition out of all the other important critical works of the past half century. Its range covers literary masterpieces from Homer and the Old Testament right through to Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust, although as Auerbach says apologetically at the end of the book, for reasons of space he had to leave out a great deal of medieval literature as well as some crucial modern writers like Pascal and Baudelaire." ==Works in English==

• Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1929. • Published in English as Dante: Poet of the Secular World. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. • Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur. Bern: Franke Verlag, 1946. • Published in English as Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. • Introduction aux études de philologie romane. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1949. The Turkish translation, published in 1944, appeared before the French original. • Published in English as Introduction to Romance Languages and Literature: Latin, French, Spanish, Provençal, Italian. Trans. Guy Daniels. New York: Capricorn, 1961. • Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays. New York: Meridian, 1959. • Chapters and papers published between 1944 and 1951, one written in English, five translated from German. Includes the 1944 version of "Figura". • Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter. Bern: Franke Verlag, 1958. • Published in English as Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. Trans. Ralph Manheim. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965. • Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach. Ed. James I. Porter. Trans. Jane O. Newman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. ==References==