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“... of correspondence between human beings and their recalcitrant surroundings. In that case, what Erich Auerbach takes in his great study Mimesis to be the most mature form of art may actually be the most regressive. To describe something as realist is to acknowledge that it is not the real thing. We call false teeth realistic, but not the Foreign ...”

“... Erich Auerbach​ ’s criticism offers a remarkable mixture of caution and daring; it’s very modest and very grand. He doesn’t believe in large, baggy words, at times is sceptical about the very concept of a concept, but he writes about nothing less than ‘the representation of reality in Western literature’, and doesn’t hesitate to make large claims about historical shifts in mood and manner ...”

“... essay entitled ‘Figura’ (reprinted in his Scenes from the Drama of European Literature), Erich Auerbach emphasises the essentially historical character of this way of reading the Bible: ‘Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the ...”

“... of evaluation. But when he is dealing with original critics of real intellectual power like Erich Auerbach, Mikhail Bakhtin, Ernst Robert Curtius, Georg Lukacs, Viktor Shklovsky and Leo Spitzer, he offers trenchant and detailed critiques of their key concepts and methods, while also conveying a sense of their achievement. ...”

“... as subhuman has sometimes served to legitimate domination by Us. As Friedman points out, following Erich Auerbach, peasants and herdsmen appear as monstrous in 12th-century aristocratic literature like the romances of Chrétien de Troyes. To adopt the language of contemporary ‘labelling theory’, we may say that a dominant group is able to create ...”

“... two Wollheims (neither of them Richard, who was born in England). Celebrated figures such as Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer, who went to Turkey, are mentioned only very briefly. Exile was a great leveller – and also a dealer of death. Much of the 20th century has been commemorated in the form of lists – Great War memorials, labour camp ...”

“... Germany (he spent the entire period of the Third Reich outside the country) for Istanbul, where Erich Auerbach would also take refuge: he must have been starting on Mimesis around the same time as Ritter was rummaging through archives in the former Ottoman capital. Robert Irwin, the editor of Tales of the Marvellous, believes from internal evidence ...”

“... about the self and its motives’ – the realm of the Protestant conscience, the world Erich Auerbach taught us to recognise as always ‘fraught with background’ – but out of this background, all the brighter for emerging from the murk, seemed to come a final decisive exteriority to the soul, a materiality, a workmanship. I think the ...”

“... is remarkable and perhaps surprising, for Tolkien, unlike literary and linguistic scholars such as Erich Auerbach and E.R. Dodds who achieved and deserved fame in this century, was not an intellectual. The reasons why one might take up his scholarship or his fiction are not the same as those that make us read Mimesis or The Greeks and the Irrational ...”

“... these questions in his readers is the reason he has been central to the history of fiction. Erich Auerbach – in what is still the best essay on Boccaccio’s style – argued that he was great at evoking the elisions and indirections of conversation, but that he could not do tragedy. That’s not quite true. Boccaccio’s great art is to make his ...”

“... selves’ are all that is left to them can they be seen and named as the sinners they are. Like Erich Auerbach (whose Dante: Poet of the Secular World was published in 1929 in German, in 1961 in English), Griffiths presents a Dante intensely reproducing – historically, psychologically and symbolically – the world in which he lived. He parts company ...”

“... Allegory (1975), Aers has argued that the debate among medievalists over whether poets wrote what Erich Auerbach called figural allegory – allegory somehow involved with history and change – or whether they wrote what Aers terms picture allegory – the mere mechanical substitution of one element for another – is not one which can be solved by a ...”

“... aren’t something one belongs to but also things one possesses,’ he added in an essay on Erich Auerbach, ‘and require the drawing of boundaries to define and own them.’ Ugrešić has written contrapuntally from the start, and her parodist’s irony was sharpened – roughened, too – by her state of homelessness (remember the title ...”

“... changes and twists, and their rendering exhibits the kind of existential seriousness that Erich Auerbach associated with the most authoritative representation of reality in literature. David, for example, a figure who until the mid-point of his story is assigned only politically motivated speech, turns to his courtiers in stark words to explain ...”

“... the procedures of the abstracting intellect. There is a good discussion of the moving passage by Erich Auerbach about how he wrote Mimesis in wartime exile in Istanbul, cut off from learned libraries, a deprivation which actually made possible the writing of this bold vast book. But Said seems to be pushing things a bit when he says ...”