Tragic realism is a concept outlined by Erich Auerbach;in many ways,it summa-rizes his understanding of mimesis and,by extension,his understanding of philology.While Auerbach employs it mainly to describe the intellectual stakes of the novel in the nineteenth century,what it captures is no less than the imperative of nineteenth-century modernity,in the wake of the French Revolution,to sustain and investigate the radical historicity of the world;hence Auerbach's emphatic concern with the everyday in Mimesis(1946).By then,howev-er,tragic realism has already dominated Auerbach's thinking,most pointedly perhaps in his Istanbul lecture on realism in 1941-1942:"tragic"suggesting that modern realism entails the intelligence of Greek tragedy,invested as Greek tragedy was in engaging the world's radical historicity,against which the conceptual apparatus of democracy was negotiated.With a focus on the Istanbul lecture,I propose to discuss tragic realism against three points that Auerbach makes,but does not pursue:first,that tragic realism serves to explain history as a structure of catastrophe,as evidenced by the Second World War;second,that the nineteenth-century English novel sidesteps realism;and third,that cinema takes over as a foothold of realism in the twentieth century.Taken together,these three claims seem to chart a tacit theory of tragic realism that supplements Mimesis and invites a general theory of modernity.
tragic realismErich Auerbachwartragedythe novelChinaatomismworld literature
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