Literary History and the Sublime in Erich Auerbach's Mimesis

This paper argues that the idea of the sublime lies at the heart of Auerbach's notion of realism as developed in Mimesis. Through a close examination of Auerbach's approach to literary history, I show that his concept of realistic representation, far from being relativistic and radically contingent as Auerbach himself asserts, is actually structural and implicitly theoretical. Auerbach's well-known notion of the mixture of styles is not a mixture or fusion of stylistic levels, but a dialectic of the human drama: a dynamic synthesis between sublimitas and humilitas, the high and the low, which created a new conception of the human being as a self-transcending entity that can be the subject of history. Thus Auerbach can be interpreted as proffering a notion of the sublime that is not merely stylistic, but sociological and humanistic.