Auerbach in Exile

Abstract

FEW WORKS of modern literary criticism have been so widely admired as Erich Auerbach's masterwork Mimesis, and yet Auerbach has found surprisingly few followers. Though Mimesis is one of a handful of works that defined comparative literature in postwar era, scholars who continue to cite and to study book show little interest in doing anything of kind themselves. The book lives on, in effect, only in fragments; while people will dispute or refine an argument in one or another of Auerbach's chapters, book as a whole has not inspired further work of comparable range or synoptic ambition. The case of Mimesis is part of a more general question: why have students of such generalists as Auerbach, Ernst Robert Curtius, and Leo Spitzer confined themselves to far narrower fields of study? Auerbach's exile in Istanbul seems, in retrospect, to have been neither so prolonged nor so complete as his book's later exile here in America. Why is this so? We may observe that, as early as publication of Frye's Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, theory began to eclipse literary history as ground of broad, generalizing work. Yet question remains why this shift occurred to begin with. One might go further and say that even at time Auerbach was writing Mimesis, era of philological method had ended, and no new generation was being trained to do his kind of work even if they wanted to. This is Edward Said's view, for example, in a recent article on state of literary studies. Even as he argues that the tiresome wheel-spinning and elaboration of much literary theory have gotten out of hand by now, he adds a caveat: