The philological humanism Goethe and Auerbach championed was already passing into elegy by 1951
Evidence
In an essay published in 1951 entitled “Philolgie der Weltliteratur,” Erich Auerbach made exactly that point at the outset of the postwar period, which was also the beginning of the Cold War. His great book Mimesis, published in Berne in 1946 but written while Auerbach was a wartime exile teaching Romance languages in Istanbul, was meant to be a testament to the diversity and concreteness of the reality represented in Western literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf; but reading the 1951 essay one senses that for Auerbach the great book he wrote was an elegy for a period when people could interpret texts philologically, concretely, sensitively, and intuitively, using erudition and an excellent command of several languages to support the kind of understanding that Goethe advocated for his understanding of Islamic literature. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 41
Categorization
- XREF: Standardization as the enemy of interpretive diversity — an echo of the homogenization theme in the reader’s communications-technology readings (Innis, Carey). — connects to: Orientalism was written as a counter-history to Auerbach’s Mimesis — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 286; Said structures Orientalism as a mirror-reversal of Auerbach’s Mimesis — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 644
- QUESTION: Auerbach’s Mimesis as ‘an elegy’ written in exile — worth probing how crisis conditions shape the construction of the Other in later Islamophobia readings.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 41
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Orientalism was written as a counter-history to Auerbach’s Mimesis — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 286; Said structures Orientalism as a mirror-reversal of Auerbach’s Mimesis — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 644