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In 2012, the BBC posted an article about a thirty-year-old man who found his childhood home using Google Maps. As a child, Saroo Brierley was separated from his brother and could not find his way back to their village. He was taken into an orphanage and eventually adopted by a couple with whom he moved to Tasmania. Twenty-five years later, he was able to locate his original home by looking at street views of roads and settlements around Calcutta. This rediscovery seemed little short of miraculous, given both the size of the country and the haziness of his memory. What led him back to his village was Google Earth’s photographic precision: it captured a familiar landscape in a way that came close to his lost experience of it.

Landscapes and Ladles: Joan Didion's Where I Was From

This article argues that Erich Auerbach's Mimesis depicts figural thinking as inextricable from ritual violence perpetuated against vulnerable, minority populations. To an extent that has been underappreciated, Mimesis also reflects on Auerbach's own complicity with anti‐Semitic Western ethnocentrism. The article uncovers an unexpected intertext for the book's second chapter, "Fortunata," which narrates the birth of figural thinking. It reads this chapter in conjunction with earlier versions of the ending of Mimesis preserved in Auerbach's Istanbul lectures. The unexpected intertext of "Fortunata" is a then‐recent bestseller about Nero's persecution of the Christian, Quo Vadis? (1896), by the Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz, in which Peter and Petronius feature as major characters and as each other's doubles. Reading Mimesis through this lens helps one see that it constructs, around such spectacles of violence, a Viconian account of Western culture's foundational, recurrent brutality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]