Erich Auerbach and the Secular World: Literary Criticism, Historiography, Postmodernism and Beyond (original) (raw)
Related papers
Late Reading: Erich Auerbach and the Spätboot of Comparative Literature
Comparative Critical Studies, 2017
Focusing in particular on Erich Auerbach's seminal essay ‘Philology of World Literature’ (1952), this essay proposes to re-examine the conceptualization of comparative literature in the post-WWII period not only from the perspective of its philological, but also from that of its historical self-understanding. Its principal concern will be to consider what it means to view this comparative philology as historical, which is to say in the context of how it emerges from the particular ‘historical perspectivism’ of the immediate post-war period. The category that best characterizes this philology, it will be argued, is that of late reading, a term that the essay coins as the hermeneutic counterpart to the artistic concept of late style. Characterized by its consciousness of coming at the end of the tradition of European high culture, late reading – at least in Auerbach's understanding of it – makes its very lateness a constituent element of its hermeneutics. Out of this sense of ...
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Erich Auerbach: history and metahistory
New literary history, 1988
We must return, in admittedly altered circumstances, to the knowledge that prenational medieval culture already possessed: the knowledge that the spirit [Geist] is not national. Erich Auerbach i I. QUESTIONS HANDLED BY THE PENCIL TO THE PAPER More than ever, I am not sure how to start this essay. The sheet seems tacky; the pencil does not progress. The falling rain interferes with the rhythm of the words. Maybe I fear my actual reading is no longer capable of recovering the old charm in which, in front of these same pages, I used to sink twenty years ago. After all, what is being asked of me? As no encyclopedia is paying for this, I can be sure nobody is demanding a text with polished and sterilized information. But neither must it be a slow and meditative rumination addressed to the monks of some remote monastery. Anyway, it is not enough to recognize my dilemma. The glasses must be glazed, or maybe it is that the language is foreign to my mind.
Erich Auerbach's Earthly (Counter-)Philology
4 Erich Auerbach held an expansive notion of what philology is and does. Taking literature as his starting point (often under the rubric of a concrete Ansatzpunkt, be this a phrase, an isolated feature of style, or a self-contained logical sequence), Auerbach restlessly sought to establish nothing less than an intellectual-or better yet, spiritual (he often calls it "inner")-history of the Western European mind as it lunged into contemporary modernity. Literary forms were for Auerbach a gateway to forms of thought, feeling, and expression. Philology was the method best suited to grasping these. The result was a philology of the world (Weltphilologie)-a politically, ideologically, and ethically engaged counter-philology that is as relevant today as it was in his own lifetime.