Erich Auerbach

Erich Auerbach (November 9, 1892 in Berlin - October 13, 1957 in Wallingford, Connecticut) was a German philologist and comparative scholar and critic of literature. His best-known work is Mimesis, a history of representation in Western literature from ancient to modern times.

Auerbach, who was Jewish, was trained in the German philological tradition and would eventually become, along with Leo Spitzer, one of its best-known scholars. After participating as combatant in World War I, he earned a doctorate in 1921 and in 1929 became a member of the philology faculty at the University of Marburg, publishing a well-received study entitled Dante: Poet of the Secular World. With the rise of National Socialism, however, Auerbach, was forced to vacate his position in 1935. Exiled from Germany, he took up residence in Istanbul, Turkey, where he wrote Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, generally considered his masterwork.

He moved to the United States in 1947, teaching at Pennsylvania State University and then working at the Institute for Advanced Study. He was made a Professor of Romance philology at Yale University in 1950, a position he held until his death in 1957. While at Yale he supervised Fredric Jameson's doctoral work.

Works

• Dante: Poet of the Secular World. ISBN 0-226-03205-1.
• Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. ISBN 0-691-11336-X.
• Literary Language and Its Public (German edition 1958)

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature is unquestionably the work for which Erich Auerbach is most famous. Written while Auerbach was teaching in Istanbul, Turkey, where he fled after being ousted from his professorship in Romance Philology at the University of Marburg by the Nazis in 1935, Mimesis famously opens with a comparison between the way the world is represented in Homer’s Odyssey and the way it appears in the Bible. From these two seminal Western texts, Auerbach builds the foundation for a unified theory of representation that spans the entire history of Western literature, including even the Modernist novelists writing at the time Auerbach began his study.

Mimesis gives an account of the way in which everyday life in its seriousness has been represented by many Western writers, from ancient Greek and Roman writers Petronius, early Christian writers such as Augustine, Renaissance writers Boccaccio, Montaigne, and Rabelais, Shakespeare and Cervantes, Enlightenment writers such as Voltaire, eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, all the way up to nineteenth and twentieth-century writers Proust, and Woolf. Despite his treatment of the many major works, Auerbach apparently did not think he was comprehensive enough, and apologized in the original publication in 1946 explaining that he had access only to the 'insufficient' resources available in the library at Istanbul University where he worked. Many scholars consider this relegation to primary texts a happy accident of history, since in their view one of the great strengths of Auerbach’s book is its focus on fine-grained close reading of the original texts rather than an evaluation of critical works.

The mode of literary criticism in which Mimesis operates is often referred to among contemporary critics as historicism, since Auerbach largely regarded the way reality is represented in the literature of various periods to be intimately bound up with social and intellectual conventions of the time in which they were written. Auerbach considered himself a historical perspectivist in the German tradition (he mentioned Hegel in this respect) extrapolating from specific features of style, grammar, syntax, and diction claims about much broader cultural and historical questions. He is in the same German tradition of philology as Ernst Robert Curtius, Leo Spitzer, and Karl Vossler, having a mastery of many languages and epochs and all-inclusive in its approach, incorporating just about any intellectual endeavor into the discipline of literary criticism. Of Mimesis, Auerbach wrote that his "purpose is always to write history." Auerbach was a Romance language specialist, which explains his admitted bias towards treating texts from French compared to other languages. Chaucer and Wordsworth are not mentioned even in passing.

Not known for its organization, Mimesis is almost universally respected for its penetrating insights on the particular works it addresses but is frequently criticized for what is sometimes regarded as its lack of a single overarching claim. For this reason, individual chapters of the book are often read independently. Most critics, however, find it hard to fault Auerbach for this and instead praise his sprawling approach for its reveling in the complexities of each work and epoch without resorting to generalities and reductionism.

By far the most frequently reprinted chapter is chapter one, Odysseus’ Scar, in which Auerbach compares the scene in book 19 of Homer’s Odyssey, when Odysseus finally returns home from his two decades of warring and journeying, to Genesis 22:1, the story of The Binding of Isaac. Highlighting the psychological transparency and consistency of the characters in the Odyssey as against what he regards as the psychological depth of the figures in the Old Testament, Auerbach suggests that the Old Testament gives a more historical impression than the Odyssey, which he classifies as closer to legend in which all details are leisurely fleshed out and all actions occur in a simple present – indeed even flashbacks are narrated in the present tense. It is in the context of this comparison that Auerbach draws his famous conclusion that the Bible’s claim to truth is "tyrannical," since its many omissions establish the insistence that "it is the only real world."

Bibliography

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Fiftieth Anniversary Ed. Trans. Willard Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Bakker, Egbert. “Mimesis as Performance: Rereading Auerbach’s First Chapter.” Poetics Today. Vol 20. Issue 1. Tel Aviv: Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, 1999. 11-26.

Baldick, Chris. “Realism.” Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 184.

Bremmer, Jan. “Erich Auerbach and His Mimesis.” Poetics Today. Vol 20. Issue 1. Tel Aviv: Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, 1999. 3-10.

Calin, William. Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis – ’Tis Fifty Years Since: A Reassessment.” Style. Vol. 33. No. 3. Fayetteville: Style, 1999. 463-474.

Green, Geoffrey. “Erich Auerbach.” Literary Criticism & the Structures of History: Erich Auerbach & Leo Spitzer. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

Holmes, Jonathan, and Streete, Adrian, Eds. Refiguring Mimesis: Representation in Early Modern Literature. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2005.

Holquist, Michael. “Erich Auerbach and the Fate of Philology Today.” Poetics Today. Vol 20. Issue 1. Tel Aviv: Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, 1999. 77-91.

Landauer, Carl. “Mimesis and Erich Auerbach’s Self-Mythologizing.” German Studies Review, Vol. 11. No. 1. Tempe: German Studies Association, 1988. 83-96.

Lerer, Seth, Ed. Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Nuttall, A. D. “New Impressions V: Auerbach’s Mimesis.” Essays in Criticism. Vol. 5. No. 1. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Said, Edward. “Erich Auerbach, Critic of the Earthly World.” Boundary 2. Summer 2004. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

External links

• Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory entry—requires subscription.
• Erich Auerbach capsule biography

For an extensive discussion of Erich Auerbach's sojourn in Turkey see A. Reisman TURKEY'S MODERNIZATION: Refugees from Nazism and Atatürk’s Vision. [1]

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