Download or read book Erich Auerbach and the Crisis of German Philology written by Avihu Zakai and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-08-24 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Mimesis written by Erich Auerbach and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Pen Confronts the Sword written by Avihu Zakai and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2018-08-28 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Manns Doctor Faustus (1947); Ernst Cassirers The Myth of the State (1946); Erich Auerbachs Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946); and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adornos 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: 18991919
Download or read book Jewish Exiles and European Thought in the Shadow of the Third Reich written by David Weinstein and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-06 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book East West Mimesis written by Kader Konuk and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-21 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Istanbul 1940 and Global Modernity written by E. Khayyat and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2018-12-11 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Jewish Exiles and European Thought during the Third Reich written by David Weinstein and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-06 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of how forced exile from 1930s Germany informed the scholarship of four German-speaking, Jewish intellectuals.
Download or read book Against World Literature written by Emily Apter and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2014-06-10 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Time History and Literature written by Erich Auerbach and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Jacob Esau written by Malachi Haim Hacohen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 757 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accommodates both the cosmopolitan narrative of the Jewish diaspora with traditional Jews and their culture.
Download or read book The Legacy of Vico in Modern Cultural History written by Joseph Mali and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-06 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joseph Mali shows how modern thinkers were inspired by Vico to create their own theories of human life and history.
Download or read book World Philology written by Sheldon Pollock and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-05 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philology—the discipline of making sense of texts—is enjoying a renaissance within academia after decades of neglect. World Philology charts the evolution of philology across the many cultures and historical time periods in which it has been practiced, and demonstrates how this branch of knowledge, like philosophy and mathematics, is an essential component of human understanding. Every civilization has developed ways of interpreting the texts that it produces, and differences of philological practice are as instructive as the similarities. We owe our idea of a textual edition for example, to the third-century BCE scholars of the Alexandrian Library. Rabbinical philology created an innovation in hermeneutics by shifting focus from how the Bible commands to what it commands. Philologists in Song China and Tokugawa Japan produced startling insights into the nature of linguistic signs. In the early modern period, new kinds of philology arose in Europe but also among Indian, Chinese, and Japanese commentators, Persian editors, and Ottoman educationalists who began to interpret texts in ways that had little historical precedent. They made judgments about the integrity and consistency of texts, decided how to create critical editions, and determined what it actually means to read. Covering a wide range of cultures—Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, Indo-Persian, Japanese, Ottoman, and modern European—World Philology lays the groundwork for a new scholarly discipline.
Download or read book Anti Judaism The Western Tradition written by David Nirenberg and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-02-04 with total page 667 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Exhilarating . . . a scholarly tour de force. The story Nirenberg has to tell is not over.”—Adam Kirsch, Tablet This incisive history upends the complacency that confines anti-Judaism to the ideological extremes in the Western tradition. With deep learning and elegance, David Nirenberg shows how foundational anti-Judaism is to the history of the West. Questions of how we are Jewish and, more critically, how and why we are not have been churning within the Western imagination throughout its history. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans; Christians and Muslims of every period; even the secularists of modernity have used Judaism in constructing their visions of the world. The thrust of this tradition construes Judaism as an opposition, a danger often from within, to be criticized, attacked, and eliminated. The intersections of these ideas with the world of power—the Roman destruction of the Second Temple, the Spanish Inquisition, the German Holocaust—are well known. The ways of thought underlying these tragedies can be found at the very foundation of Western history.
Download or read book Mimesis written by Erich Auerbach and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Jewish Exiles Psychological Interpretations of Nazism written by Avihu Zakai and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-31 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines works of four German-Jewish scholars who, in their places of exile, sought to probe the pathology of the Nazi mind: Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941), Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), and Erich Neumann’s Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (1949). While scholars have examined these authors’ individual legacies, no comparative analysis of their shared concerns has yet been undertaken, nor have the content and form of their psychological inquiries into Nazism been seriously and systematically analyzed. Yet, the sense of urgency in their works calls for attention. They all took up their pens to counter Nazi barbarism, believing, like the English jurist and judge Sir William Blackstone, who wrote in 1753 - scribere est agere ("to write is to act").
Download or read book Making and Seeing Modern Texts written by Jonathan Locke Hart and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2018-07-04 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making and Seeing Modern Texts explores the poetics of texts through a close reading and analysis across the genres of poetry, drama, fiction, non-fiction travel literature and theory. This volume demonstrates that prose, as much as poetry, share the making and seeing of language, literary practice, and theory. Genre, then, is presented as a guide that crosses multiple boundaries. This volume selects different ways to examine texts, discussing Michael Ondaatje’s early poetry and examining narrative in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. The book examines images in poetry, narrative in fiction, prefaces in non-fiction, metatheatre in drama, and attempts to see the modern and postmodern in theory, all of which show us the complexities of modernity or later modernity. One of the innovations is that the author, a literary critic/theorist, poet and historian, takes his training in practice and theory and shows, through examples of each, how language operates across genres.
Download or read book World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth written by J. Daniel Elam and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocated collective inexpertise, unknowing, and unrecognizability. Early-twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success, mastery, or national sovereignty. J. Daniel Elam shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of an impossibility: a world without colonialism. Framed by a suggestive reading of the surprising affinities between Frantz Fanon’s political writings and Erich Auerbach’s philological project, World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth foregrounds anticolonial theories of reading and critique in the writing of Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These anticolonial activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise but as a way, rather, to disavow mastery altogether. To become or remain an inexpert reader, divesting oneself of authorial claims, was to fundamentally challenge the logic of the British Empire and European fascism, which prized self-mastery, authority, and national sovereignty. Bringing together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought, Elam demonstrates how these early-twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics in the still-colonial present.
