Erich Auerbach and Literary History

Luca Somigli, Emilio Goggio Chair in Italian Studies at the University of Toronto, cordially invites you to a public lecture by Guido Mazzoni.

About the Presentation:
Mimesis (1946) by Erich Auerbach is perhaps the only work of longue durée literary history that has withstood the skepticism of our age, and one of the few literary histories written from a truly supranational perspective. The book continues to be reprinted and assigned in syllabi; some of its key notions (the serious representation of the everyday, creaturely realism, the separation and mingling of styles) have become part of the standard critical currency. It would be difficult to count the articles and doctoral dissertations on Auerbach written in the past fifteen years. And yet, in Auerbach’s masterpiece and his method there is something that many in the twenty-first century would be unable to accept, were the book not protected by the aura of the classics and by the theodicy that accompanies them. “The subtitle […], Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, “The Representation of Reality in Western Literature”, now sounds like a litany of terms perceived as desperately atavistic,” wrote Michael Holquist already in 1993. How can this paradox be explained? What is Mimesis about?

About the Presenter:
Guido Mazzoni is professor of Literary Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Siena. He has published works of literary criticism and theory (Sulla poesia moderna, Il Mulino 2005; English version On Modern Poetry, Harvard University Press 2022; Teoria del romanzo, Il Mulino 2011; English version Theory of the Novel, Harvard University Press 2017), essays on contemporary politics and society (I destini generali, Laterza 2015; Senza riparo. Sei tentativi di leggere il presente, Laterza 2025), and the poetry books I mondi (Donzelli, 2010), and La pura superficie (Donzelli, 2017). He has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, the University of California, Berkeley, and a visiting fellow at the American Academy in Rome and at the Italian Academy at Columbia University in New York.