Odysseus’ Scar. AUTHOR: Erich Auerbach. SOURCE: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western. Literature. PUBLISHER: Princeton University Press. The Homeric Style, “Odysseus’ Scar” Erich Auerbach, Mimesis. Note, for example, that Homer can never let us be in doubt about anything involving Odysseus. By far the most frequently reprinted chapter is chapter one, “Odysseus’ Scar,” in which Auerbach compares the.
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With the rise of National Socialism, however, Auerbach was forced to vacate his position in Although he acknowledged that both works exercised an enormous influence over subsequent Western literature, Auerbach held that the true motivation behind the representations erihc reality in both the Bible and the Odyssey lay outside aesthetic considerations.
Odysseus’ scar (Auerbach)
In the Odysseyas in the Iliadthere is only foreground. For how is the Jewish concept of God to be explained? He was born in Berlin inthe same sca as Walter Benjamin. This page was last edited on 12 Aprilat Looking at it from another point of view, the Odyssey is a story very limited in the scope because of the limitations imposed by rhetoric on the ways to represent reality, whereas the Bible’s “tyrannical” claim on all truth from Creation to the Last Daysresults, ironically, in an authentic representation of human experience.
The term “philology” describes the study of a language together with its literature and the historical and cultural contexts that are indispensable for an understanding of the literary works and other culturally significant texts.
In auerbaach account of the incident I have so far passed over a whole series of verses which interrupt it in the middle. Some scholars [ who?
It examines the differences between the two types of realism embodied by Homer’s Odyssey and the Old Testament.
Auerbach reserves some of his strongest language to describe this imposition and draw the contrast in the sharpest of terms:. Evident throughout his work is a concern with the question of how we are to conceptualise and engage with history. And this odysssus why, taking a long view and not to put too fine a point on itit took the death of Jesus before we could have Death of a Salesman.
Poet of the Secular World. Whence he comes, we do not know, hut the goal is clearly stated: The story of Abraham and Isaac is not better established than the story auerrbach Odysseus, Penelope, and Euryclea; both are legendary. It examines the differences between the two types of writing about reality as embodied by Homer ‘s Odyssey and the Old Testament.
Erich Auerbach November 9, – October 13, was a German philologist and comparative scholar and critic of literature. In fact, Auerbach believes this to be one reason why interpretation of The Bible has had become so abstract.
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Erich Auerbach
Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. Porter notes in his excellent introduction to Time, History, and LiteratureAuerbach suggests that the Christian view of reality has decisively shaped our historical consciousness, that it has oriented us towards a historicised view of things, but that in doing so it has also undermined itself, creating the conditions that have allowed Western civilisation to crawl out from under its universalising claims.
At the same time, he embraces the relativising implications of historicism, rejecting the idea that the literary work can or should be disconnected from its worldly context. Yet Auerbach was too scrupulous a scholar to lapse into anything like sar historical determinism. Literary theory, she proposes. Every character the poet encounters on his otherworldly journey occupies a fixed position in a universal scheme that exists beyond time.
Homer remains within the legendary with all his material, whereas the material of the Old Testament comes closer odyseus closer to history as the narrative scag in the stories of David the historical report predominates. We shall go into these later changes in the antique representation of reality when the occasion arises; on the whole, despite them, the basic tendencies of the Homeric style, which we have attempted to work out, remained effective and determinant down into late antiquity.
People do not change: And that is still a comparatively simple case. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, generally considered his masterwork.
Indeed, to begin to understand his thought it helps to keep in mind that he regarded his specialist discipline of Romance philology as a form of historical inquiry.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. We are not told.
The genius of the Homeric style becomes even more apparent when it is compared with an equally ancient and equally epic style from a different world of forms. There is also room and time for orderly, perfectly well-articulated, uniformly illuminated descriptions of implements, ministrations, and gestures; even in the dramatic moment of recognition, Homer does not omit to tell the reader that it is with his right hand that Odysseus takes the old woman by the throat to keep her from speaking, at the same time that he draws her closer to him with his left.
Unsurprisingly, much of the criticism of this essay has come from classicists, many of them finding Auerbach’s reading of The Odyssey overly simplistic. Art, music, literature, sports and leisure Biography Credited.
As a result odysseuz this claim to absolute authority, the method aurebach interpretation spread to traditions other than the Jewish. He does not come, like Zeus or Poseidon, from the Aethiopians, where he has been enjoying a sacrificial feast.
Odysseus’ scar (Auerbach) – Wikipedia
Auerbach notes here the clarity and orderliness of Homer’s verse, as well as the tidy comparative, causal, and temporal relationships articulated by Homer’s precise syntactical constructions, all hallmarks of the rhetorical tradition. Connected with the matters just discussed is the fact that the Greek text seems more limited and more static in respect to the circle of personages involved in the action and to their political activity. There are a number of interesting aspects to this argument.
Highlighting the psychological transparency and consistency of the characters in the Odyssey as against what he odyssehs as the psychological depth of the figures in the Old Testament, Auerbach suggests that the Old Testament gives a more historical impression than the Odyssey, which he classifies as closer to legend in which all details are leisurely fleshed out and all actions occur in a simple present—indeed even flashbacks are narrated in the present tense.
With the more profound historicity and the more profound social activity of the Old Testament text, there is connected yet another important distinction from Homer: Delight in physical existence is everything to them, and their highest aim is to make that delight perceptible to us.
Sxar scholars maintain, instead, that the poetry rather than the prose of the Old Testament would be more appropriate for comparison to Homer’s verse.