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Ep. 80: With philosopher, author, and Auerbach scholar Matthias Bormuth (b.1963), a professor of Comparative Intellectual History at University of Oldenburg. On Erich Auerbach's MIMESIS: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), and how it was influenced by the great Neapolitan thinker Giambattista Vico's NEW SCIENCE (1744). I first met Matthias at this Phillip Roth festival in Newark I wrote about back in March for the Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/04/19/reading-myself-and-others-roth-festival-dispatch/ Giambattista Vico was born in Naples in 1668 and was a relatively unknown Professor of Rhetoric at the city's university. He'd work on and revise his ambitious work NEW SCIENCE throughout his life, publishing preliminary versions in 1725 and 1730, though it wasn't till his death in 1744 that the third and final version appeared. Vico's text, most of all his literal and historical view of Homer, would go on to hugely influence James Joyce's writing of Ulysses (a l