“A scene like Peter's denial fits into no antique genre. It is too serious for comedy, too contemporary and everyday for tragedy, politically too insignificant for history—and the form which was given it is one of such immediacy that its like does not exist in the literature of antiquity.”

—  Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

Source: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), p. 45

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A scene like Peter's denial fits into no antique genre. It is too serious for comedy, too contemporary and everyday for…" by Erich Auerbach?
Erich Auerbach photo
Erich Auerbach7
German Philologist 1892–1957

Related quotes

Ferdinand de Saussure photo

“I’m almost never serious, and I’m always too serious. Too deep, too shallow. Too sensitive, too cold hearted. I’m like a collection of paradoxes.”

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) Swiss linguist

Samuel Butler photo

“God does not intend people, and does not like people, to be too good. He likes them neither too good nor too bad, but a little too bad is more venial with him than a little too good.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Vice and Virtue, iii
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part II - Elementary Morality

“If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk—and feisty gentlemen.”

Larry McMurtry Lonesome Dove

Source: Lonesome Dove

“The word (classical) carries the implication that the works of art and literature produced in Graeco-Roman antiquity possess an absolute value, that they form the standard by which all others are to be judged.”

Jasper Griffin (1937–2019) Public Orator and Professor of Classical Literature

The Oxford History of the Classical World (with John Boardman and Oswyn Murray, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) p. 3

Richard Rodríguez photo

“One can become overwhelmed on vacation—I have become so—by thinking thoughts that are too large. There is a condition identified in psychology textbooks as the Stendhal syndrome, also called, or related to, the Jerusalem syndrome, that describes a tourist’s overwhelmed response to great works of art or to a sudden apprehension of scale, antiquity, multitude, death—the accompanying fear is of one’s insignificance, but also of squandered opportunity.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

Thomas Browne photo

“Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things.”

Thomas Browne book Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial

Source: Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial (1658), Chapter V

Issa Rae photo

“There was such a dearth of films like that…And the high-school teen movie is a genre that I love. Everything at that age is so heightened and dramatic, and high-school movies capture that so perfectly. But those films are all white, too; there’s no black teen movie genre that exists in the same way.”

Issa Rae (1985) American actress and writer

On how she didn’t see herself represented in the teen film genre in “Issa Rae: ‘I’ve not started writing season four of Insecure yet. We needed a break’” https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/apr/13/issa-rae-interview-insecure-little in The Guardian (2019 Apr 13)

“Tatia: I think its too big to fit”

Paullina Simons book The Bronze Horseman

Source: The Bronze Horseman

Arthur Stanley Eddington photo

“Science has an important part to play in our everyday existence, and there is far too much neglect of science; but its intention is to supplement not to supplant the familiar outlook.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Science and the Unseen World (1929), VIII, p.83

Related topics