This lecture situates Auerbach in the context of the Christian Existentialism of Marburg during his pre-Istanbul time there and then sets his readings of Augustine in conversation with the Augustines of Hannah Arendt and Hans Jonas, both of whom were influenced by Heidegger’s Augustine. In the process, it will extract Auerbach out of the critical impasse into which he has been wedged between a mandarin Eurocentric and a pre-post colonial exilic consciousness. The theo-philosophical conversations in which he was engaged in his early work had a robust afterlife in the magisterial Mimesis (1946), and help explain the huge popularity of that book when it was translated into English in 1953.

Jane O. Newman is Professor of Comparative Literature at University of California, Irvine. She is interested in dialogues between the pre- and early modern past and the modern and postmodern present. Her primary fields are Renaissance and Early Modern English, French, German, Italian and neo-Latin literature and culture.