Said on Auerbach: Hospitality or How the Western Canon transformed into Weltliteratur

Abstract

Edward Said's approbation of the Jewish-German scholar Erich Auerbach's Mimesis written during the latter's exile in Istanbul has become a challenge to literary criticism for questioning its national and canonical boundaries. Yet this also erroneously led to Mimesis being associated with world literature postcolonial and minority studies. This post-Saidean reception of Auerbach minimizes the fact that there is no direct engagement with questions of Jewish alterity or the study of world literatures in Mimesis. Inspired by Said's reference to Auerbach's philology as a form of hospitality this paper reads Mimesis through Jacques Derrida's concept of hospitality. With reference to the contradictory nature of deconstructive hospitality and the context of German biblical and classical philology it is argued that Auerbach's monolithic Western canon in Mimesis is indeed hospitable towards the other of Europe at the time Judaism, however that it is also hostile towards the other-than-European cultures because it is steeped in Auerbach's own disciplinary discourse which primarily relied on the interactions between Judaic Hellenic and Christian elements of culture. Once re-interpreted through deconstructive hospitality Said's hyperbolic use of Auerbach as an arch-comparatist and an instigator of Weltliteratur can provide valuable insights for the study of minority cultures and literatures today.