Erich Auerbach and the Crisis of German Philology

Erich Auerbach and the Crisis of German Philology PDF Author: Avihu Zakai
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319409581
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
This book analyzes and contextualizes Auerbach’s life and mind in the wide ideological, philological, and historical context of his time, especially the rise of Aryan philology and its eventual triumph with the Nazi Revolution or the Hitler Revolution in Germany of 1933. It deals specifically with his struggle against the premises of Aryan philology, based on völkisch mysticism and Nazi historiography, which eliminated the Old Testament from German Kultur and Volksgeist in particular, and Western culture and civilization in general. It examines in detail his apologia for, or defense and justification of, Western Judaeo-Christian humanist tradition at its gravest existential moment. It discusses Auerbach’s ultimate goal, which was to counter the overt racist tendencies and völkish ideology in Germany, or the belief in the Community of Blood and Fate of the German people, which sharply distinguished between Kultur and civilization and glorified völkisch nationalism over European civilization. The volume includes an analysis of the entire twenty chapters of Auerbach’s most celebrated book: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1946.

Erich Auerbach and the Crisis of German Philology

Erich Auerbach and the Crisis of German Philology PDF Author: Avihu Zakai
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319409581
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Get Book

Book Description
This book analyzes and contextualizes Auerbach’s life and mind in the wide ideological, philological, and historical context of his time, especially the rise of Aryan philology and its eventual triumph with the Nazi Revolution or the Hitler Revolution in Germany of 1933. It deals specifically with his struggle against the premises of Aryan philology, based on völkisch mysticism and Nazi historiography, which eliminated the Old Testament from German Kultur and Volksgeist in particular, and Western culture and civilization in general. It examines in detail his apologia for, or defense and justification of, Western Judaeo-Christian humanist tradition at its gravest existential moment. It discusses Auerbach’s ultimate goal, which was to counter the overt racist tendencies and völkish ideology in Germany, or the belief in the Community of Blood and Fate of the German people, which sharply distinguished between Kultur and civilization and glorified völkisch nationalism over European civilization. The volume includes an analysis of the entire twenty chapters of Auerbach’s most celebrated book: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1946.

The Pen Confronts the Sword

The Pen Confronts the Sword PDF Author: Avihu Zakai
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438471637
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Demonstrates how four books by dissident German intellectuals served as a rebuke to the Nazi regime. During 1942, the decisive battles of Stalingrad and El Alamein raged and the Nazi genocide was at its lethal peak. The Pen Confronts the Sword examines the shared motives behind four remarkable texts German exiles began writing that year: Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947); Ernst Cassirer’s The Myth of the State (1946); Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946); and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). Each identified a specific danger in Nazi ideology and mustered new theories, approaches, and sources to combat it. The books aimed to expose the encompassing catastrophes of German culture (Mann), politics (Cassirer), philology (Auerbach), and philosophy and sociology (Horkheimer and Adorno). Their scope, mastery, and sense of urgency constitute a comprehensive Kulturkampf(culture war) against Nazi barbarism. Avihu Zakai cogently analyzes each work, explains the context of its creation, and draws connections between these four landmark books in Western intellectual history. “This book provides a remarkable synopsis of four well-known, but disparate, responses to Nazism and links them as part of a humanist cultural war with dictatorship. By combining the readings of Mann, Cassirer, Auerbach, and Adorno/Horkheimer, we gain a comprehensive view of an ideal of Western culture composed from very different directions. This approach unlocks a reading of these classics of modern scholarship that is usually lost either in their specific reception by subdisciplines or in their isolated reading as brilliant works.” — Gregory B. Moynahan, author of Ernst Cassirer and the Critical Science of Germany: 1899–1919

Mimesis

Mimesis PDF Author: Erich Auerbach
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780691012698
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Jewish Exiles and European Thought in the Shadow of the Third Reich

Jewish Exiles and European Thought in the Shadow of the Third Reich PDF Author: David Weinstein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316738876
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Hans Baron, Karl Popper, Leo Strauss and Erich Auerbach were among the many German-speaking Jewish intellectuals who fled Continental Europe with the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. Their scholarship, though not normally considered together, is studied here to demonstrate how, despite their different disciplines and distinctive modes of working, they responded polemically in the guise of traditional scholarship to their shared trauma. For each, the political calamity of European fascism was a profound intellectual crisis, requiring an intellectual response which Weinstein and Zakai now contextualize, ideologically and politically. They exemplify just how extensively, and sometimes how subtly, 1930s and 1940s scholarship was used not only to explain, but to fight the political evils that had infected modernity, victimizing so many. An original perspective on a popular area of research, this book draws upon a mass of secondary literature to provide an innovative and valuable contribution to twentieth-century intellectual history.

East West Mimesis

East West Mimesis PDF Author: Kader Konuk
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804775755
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
East West Mimesis follows the plight of German-Jewish humanists who escaped Nazi persecution by seeking exile in a Muslim-dominated society. Kader Konuk asks why philologists like Erich Auerbach found humanism at home in Istanbul at the very moment it was banished from Europe. She challenges the notion of exile as synonymous with intellectual isolation and shows the reciprocal effects of German émigrés on Turkey's humanist reform movement. By making literary critical concepts productive for our understanding of Turkish cultural history, the book provides a new approach to the study of East-West relations. Central to the book is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, written in Istanbul after he fled Germany in 1936. Konuk draws on some of Auerbach's key concepts—figura as a way of conceptualizing history and mimesis as a means of representing reality—to show how Istanbul shaped Mimesis and to understand Turkey's humanist reform movement as a type of cultural mimesis.

Istanbul 1940 and Global Modernity

Istanbul 1940 and Global Modernity PDF Author: E. Khayyat
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498585841
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
This book revisits Erich Auerbach’s Istanbul writings as pioneering works of contemporary literary history and cultural criticism. It interprets these writings, which center around Western literary cultures, against the background of Auerbach’s Turkish colleagues’ works that trace Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural histories.

Mimesis

Mimesis PDF Author: Erich Auerbach
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400847958
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 616

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Book Description
More than half a century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis remains a masterpiece of literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. This new expanded edition includes a substantial essay in introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay, never before translated into English, in which Auerbach responds to his critics. A German Jew, Auerbach was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935. He left for Turkey, where he taught at the state university in Istanbul. There he wrote Mimesis, publishing it in German after the end of the war. Displaced as he was, Auerbach produced a work of great erudition that contains no footnotes, basing his arguments instead on searching, illuminating readings of key passages from his primary texts. His aim was to show how from antiquity to the twentieth century literature progressed toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. This essentially optimistic view of European history now appears as a defensive--and impassioned--response to the inhumanity he saw in the Third Reich. Ranging over works in Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English, Auerbach used his remarkable skills in philology and comparative literature to refute any narrow form of nationalism or chauvinism, in his own day and ours. For many readers, both inside and outside the academy, Mimesis is among the finest works of literary criticism ever written. This Princeton Classics edition includes a substantial introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay in which Auerbach responds to his critics.

Jewish Exiles and European Thought during the Third Reich

Jewish Exiles and European Thought during the Third Reich PDF Author: David Weinstein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107166462
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
A study of how forced exile from 1930s Germany informed the scholarship of four German-speaking, Jewish intellectuals.

Against World Literature

Against World Literature PDF Author: Emily Apter
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784780030
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description
Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability argues for a rethinking of comparative literature focusing on the problems that emerge when large-scale paradigms of literary studies ignore the politics of the "Untranslatable"-the realm of those words that are continually retranslated, mistranslated, transferred from language to language, or especially resistant to substitution. In the place of "World Literature"-a dominant paradigm in the humanities, one grounded in market-driven notions of readability and universal appeal-Apter proposes a plurality of "world literatures" oriented around philosophical concepts and geopolitical pressure points. The history and theory of the language that constructs World Literature is critically examined with a special focus on Weltliteratur, literary world systems, narrative ecosystems, language borders and checkpoints, theologies of translation, and planetary devolution in a book set to revolutionize the discipline of comparative literature.

Time, History, and Literature

Time, History, and Literature PDF Author: Erich Auerbach
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691234523
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Important essays from one of the giants of literary criticism, including a dozen published here in English for the first time Erich Auerbach (1892-1957), best known for his classic literary study Mimesis, is celebrated today as a founder of comparative literature, a forerunner of secular criticism, and a prophet of global literary studies. Yet the true depth of Auerbach's thinking and writing remains unplumbed. Time, History, and Literature presents a wide selection of Auerbach's essays, many of which are little known outside the German-speaking world. Of the twenty essays culled for this volume from the full length of his career, twelve have never appeared in English before, and one is being published for the first time. Foregrounded in this major new collection are Auerbach's complex relationship to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, his philosophy of time and history, and his theory of human ethics and responsible action. Auerbach effectively charts out the difficult discovery, in the wake of Christianity, of the sensuous, the earthly, and the human and social worlds. A number of the essays reflect Auerbach's responses to an increasingly hostile National Socialist environment. These writings offer a challenging model of intellectual engagement, one that remains as compelling today as it was in Auerbach's own time.