Summary
German comparatist who found refuge in the United States as a result of fascism, author of Mimesis, whose training and whose post-war essay “Philologie der Weltliteratur” Edward Said uses to chart comparative literature’s Eurocentric hierarchy and its crisis (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.70-74 / printed p.43-47).
Details
- Auerbach and Leo Spitzer exemplify the older comparative-literature style — scholarship principally, not criticism — formed by a long philological apprenticeship and secure grounding in the classical languages and early European vernaculars; Francis Fergusson, reviewing Mimesis, said such a philologist made even the most intransigent scholars appear timid and relaxed (PDF p.70-71 / printed p.43-44).
- Dante’s supreme importance to Auerbach, Curtius, Vossler and Spitzer is explained by the thesis that Western realistic literature emerges from the Christian Incarnation (PDF p.72 / printed p.45).
- In “Philologie der Weltliteratur”, written after World War Two, Auerbach notes how many “other” literary languages and literatures seemed to have emerged — mentioning neither colonialism nor decolonization — and expresses more anguish and fear than pleasure: Romania is under threat (PDF p.72 / printed p.45).
- Mimesis, written while Auerbach was in exile from Nazi Europe in Istanbul, was, he says in his 1951 essay, an act of civilizational survival, presenting perhaps for the last time the complex evolution of European literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf; Said notes that its mission died in the often trivial uses later made of it (PDF p.74 / printed p.47).