Orientalism was written as a counter-history to Auerbach’s Mimesis

Evidence

But why should this ‘inventory’ of traces take the form of a counter-reading of the Western canonical textualities, mainly in the cognate areas of literature and philology, from Greek tragedy onwards? The reason was again a personal one, though it was really not connected with being a Palestinian. Said had been trained primarily in the classical mould of scholarship in Comparative European Literatures, in a milieu dominated by Auerbach, Curtius and Spitzer, the German comparatists who had given to the discipline its stamp of High Humanism of a very conservative kind, more or less Tory in orientation. It was the ghost of this precise canonicity which had to be laid to rest. The particular texture of Orientalism, its emphasis on the canonical text, its privileging of literature and philology in the constitution of ‘Orientalist’ knowledge and indeed the human sciences generally, its will to portray a ‘West’ which has been the same from the dawn of history up to the present, and its will to traverse all the main languages of Europe – all this, and more, in Orientalism derives from the ambition to write a counter-history that could be posed against Mimesis, Auerbach’s magisterial account of the seamless genesis of European realism and rationalism from Greek Antiquity to the modernist moment. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 286

Categorization

• XREF: Reframes Orientalism’s genre-bending form as an answer to a specific German comparatist canonical tradition. — connects to: Said structures Orientalism as a mirror-reversal of Auerbach’s Mimesis
• SEED: Angle: reading a polemic’s structure as a rebuttal to the exact scholarly canon the author was trained in — canon as personal ghost to exorcise.

Related

• Said structures Orientalism as a mirror-reversal of Auerbach’s Mimesis (similarity 0.95)
• Said locates Orientalism’s founding structure in Aeschylean tragedy (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism’s intent was critique, not affirmation of antithetical identities (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism must be examined at both the general and the individual level (similarity 0.82)
• Scholarly Orientalism telescoped textual detail into policy about the whole Orient (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism functioned as a Western self-projection requiring an invented East as its antithesis (similarity 0.81)
• Prominent critics of Orientalism have praised scholars deeply complicit in its assumptions. (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalist texts were designed for Western readers, not Oriental ones. (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism is only the visible tip of a larger modern structure. (similarity 0.81)
• Even putatively impartial scientific Orientalism remains an egoistic interpretive act that rebuilds its object. (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism criticism became a politicized ad hominem charge, not an epistemic critique (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalism fixes the Oriental as passive object while the Orientalist holds interpretive power (similarity 0.80)
• No critique of Orientalism has displaced or surpassed Said’s book (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalism is a differentiated analysis, not a blanket attack on the West (similarity 0.80)
• Sympathetic German Orientalism also enabled anti-imperialist critique of Western academia (similarity 0.80)