Ep. 80: With philosopher, author, and Auerbach scholar Matthias Bormuth (b.1963), a professor of Comparative Intellectual History at University of Oldenburg. On Erich Auerbach's MIMESIS: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), and how it was influenced by the great Neapolitan thinker Giambattista Vico's NEW SCIENCE (1744).

I first met Matthias at this Phillip Roth festival in Newark I wrote about back in March for the Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/04/19/reading-myself-and-others-roth-festival-dispatch/

Giambattista Vico was born in Naples in 1668 and was a relatively unknown Professor of Rhetoric at the city's university. He'd work on and revise his ambitious work NEW SCIENCE throughout his life, publishing preliminary versions in 1725 and 1730, though it wasn't till his death in 1744 that the third and final version appeared. Vico's text, most of all his literal and historical view of Homer, would go on to hugely influence James Joyce's writing of Ulysses (a literal retelling of the Odyssey), along with other modernists.

Erich Auerbach's 1946 work of literary criticism MIMESIS treats canonical texts from the Bible to Homer to Dante to Don Quixote to Zola up to Virginia Woolf as literal-historical writers trying to understand their time, only speaking from their provisional perspective, rather than as deific texts to unpack as divine providence. A German-Jew who fought for Germany in the first World War, Auerbach worked at a library from 1922-1929, during which time he translated Vico's NEW SCIENCE into German for the first time. Matthias and I try to unpack the connection between these two texts, and to find the relevance between them and our current age.

Some notes: Overview of Giambattista Vico (4:22); Auerbach’s early years following World War One translating Vico (9:24); Auerbach on Zola’s Germinal (40:22); Matthias’s critique of Heidegger (50:22); writing as Letter Writing / Auerbach’s letters (1:07:33); Matthias on Knausgaard (1:11:55).