East West Mimesis

Auerbach in Turkey

Bibliographic Data

ID19985075
AuthorsKader Konuk (0000-0001-7460-2678), Victoria Holbrook, Victoria Rowe Holbrook (0000-0002-3423-8645)
Year2010
Publication date2010-09-21
Open AccessYes
TypeBOOK
VenueEast-West mimesis (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherStanford University Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.11126/stanford/9780804769747.001.0001
OpenAlexW4210854461
Open LibraryOL23945296M
ISBN9780804769747
LanguageEN
Citations received10

This book follows the plight of German-Jewish humanists who escaped Nazi persecution by seeking exile in a Muslim-dominated society. The book asks why philologists like Erich Auerbach found humanism at home in Istanbul at the very moment it was banished from Europe. It 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. The book 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.

Geography · Australian History and Society · History · Travel Writing and Literature · 1892-1957 · 20th century · asia · Auerbach, Erich · civilization · Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) · Europe · Historians · Humanism · Intellectual life · Istanbul · Jewish refugees · Literary historians · Philologists · Turkey · Turkish influences · Western influences

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