Mimesis e la storia

Abstract

This paper interprets Mimesis as the last major philosophy of literary history that still preserves a meaningful connection to the Romantic-Idealist tradition. It reconstructs the book’s theoretical and methodological foundations and shows how Auerbach manages to bring together two aims that seem hard to reconcile. On one side, he is deeply committed to philological tradition, to an inductive method, and to close readings of individual texts. On the other, he aspires to build a broad historical synthesis. The structure of Mimesis is shaped by a tension between foreground and background, between detailed textual analysis and the implicit categories that underlie it. In this way, the book strikes a balance between positivist and idealist historicism. Auerbach presents European literary history as a sequence of three major mimetic paradigms – classical, Christian, and modern – each reflecting a different idea of reality. The paper ends by examining the political dimension of Auerbach’s narrative. Rather than affirming hierarchical models of representation, Mimesis points toward an egalitarian vision of human life and seeks to preserve the idea of totality in an age marked by fragmented knowledge and the decline of grand.