In the final chapter of his recent study on literary realism (The Real Thing, 2024), Terry Eagleton gives a brief overview of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis before commenting on Auerbach's "impatience with abstract and general forms of cognition". Indeed, Auerbach seems to have a penchant for the concrete and humble, but probably such "post-Romantic" aspect of his work should always be considered against his clear and grand vision of historical progress. After all, as Eagleton points out, the entire volume of Mimesis as the story of an ever more richer, more intricate realism was effectively written as a response to fascism.

It would be more helpful, then, to point to the tension between the concrete and the abstract in Auerbach's philology, and examine the nature of "synthesis" in his readings (or his "syntactic conquest", as Fredric Jameson describes Auerbach's attempt). Can philological approach properly interpret the concrete detail without imposing abstract truth? If Auerbach was the champion of the multiple, fluid and divers as Eagleton suggests, why was he not favorable on the overtly fluid experimental writing of modernists like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce? (A useful comparison may be made with Adorno's dialectical approach which is equally alert to the clash between particularity and abstract reasoning, but allowing far more favorable evaluation on high modernism.)

This paper shows that Auerbach's engagement with the mingling between the sublime and the vulgar is especially relevant in the current culturalist context in which Theories tend to underestimate diachronic change in the universal history of human emancipation. In the context of comparative literature, Auerbach's idea of Weltliteratur opens up a possibility to rediscover non-European literature, not simply as "the other" of the West, but as a part of common human progress on the same "earth". His insight particularly invites us to re-evaluate those humanistic literary traditions outside Europe which encourage universal values in ways specific to their local contexts.

A case in point is Japanese novelist Kenzaburō Ōe's literary achievement. Ōe is a master of realism that portrays the suffering of main characters as a product of society still incapable of justice yet illuminated by the hope of salvation. Ōe's imagination thus resonates with Auerbach's responsiveness to comprehensive historical vision realized in individual rendering. Given that Ōe is profoundly influenced by prominent European literary figures such as Dante, Rabelais, Wiliam Blake, and W. B. Yeats, one could even argue that the complex themes and style of Ōe's novels is a "synthesis" of European and non-European realist tradition. From such perspective I explore the ways in which Ōe's literary endeavor is meaningfully related to Auerbach's legacy.

As Edward Said points out in his preface for Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, Goethe’s utopian notion “Weltliteratur” (“world literature”), as a transnational and humanistic synthesis of all national literatures in the world, serves as a conceptual foundation for the later discipline of comparative literature. While later in “Philology and Weltliteratur” (1951), Auerbach delineates the challenges “Weltliteratur” faces in the postwar globalized world: the standardization of culture and way of life under the hegemony of Euro-American influence, along with the specialization and professionalization of the education institution, lead to the increasing difficulty in the synthesis of a transnational worldly philology — that is, a historiography of human religion, poetics, literature, politics, and culture.

My paper investigates how Auerbach’s notions on philology and “Weltliteratur” as a humanistic synthesis get reconfigured in storytelling narratives in contemporary global media. Engaging with David Damrosch’s analysis of Auerbach and “Weltliteratur”, Frederic Jameson’s theories on postmodernism and visual media, as well as Jacques Ranciere’s discussion of aesthetics and politics, I present a “global Auerbach” and his ideas on philology and “Weltliteratur” in the postmodern regimes of art.

The materiality of aesthetic historicism can mediate the "aesthetic" and "historical" elements of literary theory, taking into account aesthetic ethics while maintaining historical truth. Yang Yibo distinguishes between Classical Historicism, aesthetic historicism and Aesthetic Historicism. Classical Historicism is dedicated to making the discipline of history a "new science"; "aesthetic historicism" is a literary theory from the perspective of the relationship between literature and history; while Aesthetic Historicism is a kind of thought infused with historical consciousness in the development of classical German philosophy. Compared with the former two, Aesthetic Historicism is not satisfied with the refinement of its own theoretical system, but intends to construct the historical consciousness and national spirit of the German nation. (See Yang Yibo, German Classical Aesthetic Historicism, China Social Science Press, 2017, pp. 37-58.)The meanings of "aesthetic historicism" and "Aesthetic Historicism" both refer to aesthetics and history, but the few recorded uses of the term also lowercase the initial letter instead of capitalizing it. The former is the result of several scholars' explicit definitions, while the latter is the result of a single scholar's theoretical construction. Therefore, although the actual discussion inevitably involves the trend of "capitalized" German aesthetic historicism and its practical influence, the "aesthetic historicism" in this paper is mainly the lowercase "aesthetic historicism" centered on Vico, Auerbach, and Hayden White. Aesthetic historism can be traced back to the Vico's discourse on "poetic wisdom" and the concept of history, which is summarized in the article "Vico and Aesthetic Historism" published by the literary critic Erich Auerbach in 1949. In 1959, the American historian Hayden White published Italian historian Carlo Antoni's From History to Sociology: The Transition in German Historical Thinking, and in the translator's introduction, he systematically elaborated the concept of aesthetic historicism. The materiality of aesthetic historicism is embodied in three aspects: firstly, the productive activities of poetic wisdom and its image are material; the poetic production of literary creation, theory and criticism activities depends on the material basis, and the poetic image (or linguistic symbols) is also characterized by its productive nature. Secondly, each element of literary activity participates in the historical process of overdetermination as social energy in a specific socio-historical context. Finally, writing events and textual events are processual and embodied, and embodied metaphors are able to evoke bodily sensations and respond to the existential and ethical problems of today's world through the "distribution of sensibility". The "deenchantment" of the materiality of aesthetic historicism can inject new vitality into contemporary realism and lead to an "aesthetic-historical materialism".

In his text The Philology of World Literature Erich Auerbach attempts to implement an idea of world literature that is resolutely anti-global, and, in this sense, it seems entirely at odds with an approach to world literature that has gained currency as world’s most valuable literatures, even if primarily in (English) translation. On the other hand, Auerbach’s approach to the study of world literature is utterly global in the sense that it encompasses all possible literatures and all possible languages, and not only that, but also all the historical and philosophical, or we might say, theoretical developments and reflections that may have led to the literary forms and contents. Moreover, Auerbach apparently does not regard world literature in this manner for its own sake, or out of mere aesthetic or scholarly curiosity. Rather, there is a twofold movement in his considerations. On the one hand, Auerbach speaks of the richness (Reichtum) of ‘earth cultures’ (Erdkulturen) that he wants to preserve in this way. On the other hand, world literature for him seems to represent a general human code and mode of thinking that can be utilized for deciphering the contemporary as well as the arrivant, the possibilities of the future. But it is not meta-theorizations that he seeks, rather Auerbach emphasizes the singular and ‘intuitive’ for an appreciation of literature. Methodologically, he endorses and advises a form of critical engagement with the literary text that aims at identifying what might be called epistemological and theoretical ‘radiation’ (Strahlung). In doing so, he approaches historicity as a condition for coming to terms with a more or less valid understanding of the literatures of the world.

In this sense, world literature becomes a mapping for apprehension, a theoretical field of textuality that is important for the intelligibility of the world. For Auerbach, then, the concept of world literature is almost a counter-conception to the logocentrism of the ‘sciences’; It is a deep reading of how the world has been constituted historically and how it may possibly continue to evolve from a humanistic and ethical point of view. Taking these lines as a starting point, in this paper, I wish to dwell on the historical, epistemological, and affective economy of Auerbach’s text that drives his theoretical pursuit of an engagement with world literature in order to navigate his approach of an ethical quest in his understanding of world literature for what he calls ‘earth cultures’ (Erdkulturen) as a critical, anti-globalization endeavor that seeks a democratic, anti-dominant humanism built on the richness and singularity of the earth’s literary imagination.