I learned of Mimesis when reading the Introduction to Roberto González Echevarría’s Cervantes' Don Quixote: A Casebook, which features one of its essays. I read the first essay, “Odysseus’s Scar”, and it gripped me at once.

Auerbach was a philologist, and despite the close attention to the texts he studies, Mimesis is distinctly a work of history, tracing how literature, at first mainly a way to entertain with myths and portray great deeds, gradually developed into a multifaceted portrayal of human living.

What grips me more than anything else is Auerbach’s ability to connect his larger themes with particular language and narrative choices.

I’m reading Auerbach’s book slowly. Further posts concerning the book will be about my wrestling with its individual essays.