Against pleonexia

Erich Auerbach’s essay on world literature, written in the early postwar period, has become central to our understanding of the field. This essay contextualizes Auerbach on world literature by approaching it through his larger project, which it thinks about in relation to scholars rarely considered in this context. These scholars are the French literary historians and critics Hippolyte Taine and Remy de Gourmont, and the German historical sociologist Alexander Rüstow. To place Auerbach at an intersection of these very different figures turns out to be illuminating. It both enlarges our sense of him and helps us better understand why he turned to world literature in the early 1950s. In particular, the essay argues that world literature is, for Auerbach, as much a political as a literary category, with roots in both post-Nietzschean end-of-history thought and the Cold War stand-off between capitalism and communism

Capitalism · First world war · German · History of literature · Politics · World literature · World War II · Comparative and World Literature · Critical Theory and Political Philosophy · Education, Philosophy, and Society