Realtà, realismo, straniamento: Auerbach e il romanzo cavalleresco fino a Cervantes

Auerbach’s research, besides exploring the three main fields the author explicitly names (i.e. the succession of different and differently grounded forms of realism in literary fiction, the alternate splitting and melting of styles, the link between literary work and a Christian vision of the world), in various chapters of Mimesis, and particularly in chs. 2, 6, 12, 14 and 20, is also focused, albeit only implicitly, on the developments of a further distinctive feature in Western literature, which is the emergence of subjectivity in the representation of reality. Focusing mainly on the chapter on courtly romance (ch. 6) and on the Quijote (ch. 14), this essay will examine Auerbach’s interpreting work on texts that adopt, in different ways, a ‘subjective point of view’; this kind of interpretation is, in part, unexpectedly similar to the approach of other critics and theorists of literature contemporary to Auerbach, like Bachtin, Américo Castro and Viktor Šklovskij.