Abstract

In the last chapter of Mimesis, Erich Auerbach compares the structure of his book to the structure of the Twentieth-Century modernist novel. It is not a new idea, to find structural corrispondences between literature and criticism; however, Auerbach was the first one using explicitly the modernist novel as a cognitive and writing pattern, and modernism as a method. This essay tries to use Auerbach's suggestion to analyze Giacomo Debenedetti and his critical approach, through the interpretative key of modernism.