Abstract
Chapter 8 of Auerbach’s Mimesis on Canto X of Dante’s Inferno, where Dante meets Farinata and Cavalcante, begins with a long quotation that ends just before Farinata’s prediction of Dante’s exile from Florence. It almost seems as if Auerbach does not want to directly address this issue that involves him personally. However, according to David Damrosch, we can find a complex overlay of Dante’s characters, Dante the author and Auerbach himself: on the one hand, Dante, the “poet of the earthly world”, took over earthly reality, passions and characters into his beyond. On the other hand, Auerbach writes in Istanbul a “German book” which “would not have been thinkable in any other tradition than in that of Hegel and the German Romantics”.
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