Sumario: | Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature was published more than sixty years ago and is considered a classic. The book brought into focus the fundamental difference that exists between the two basic approaches to the textual representation of reality in Western culture. These two styles, as Auerbach called them, were archetypically displayed in Homer's poems and in the Old Testament, respectively. Auerbach's differentiation is the starting point for this author's work, which expands and develops on this theory in several key ways. One of the more significant differences between the two styles transcends and grounds all the others. It concerns the truth of each of the two archetypal texts, or rather, the attitude exhibited in those texts with regard to the truth of what they narrate. Auerbach, the author notes, is amazed at the Bible's passionate concern for the truth of what it says - a concern he found absent in Homer. The author finds that what the prophet Isaiah called a refuge of lies defines Homer's work. He draws on his own research and Ren Girard's theory of the sacred to develop an enhanced perspective of the relationship between these texts.
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