Ortwin de Graef

A Common Humanity Is Not Yet Enough: Shadows of the Coming Race in George Eliot's Final Fiction

On both occasions, the issue appears to be a form of false belief which somehow is current though nobody really holds it, or is not yet quite current but bound to be held by some would-be philosopher. The latter seems more threatening, and the denunciation it receives derives added authority from its being George Eliot’s final statement in fiction: these are the last words of Theophrastus Such, the last figure performed by the author George Eliot as performed by Marian Evans Lewes, as she then was, directed against a teacher of “a blinding superstition” who is a figment of a rhetorical question but apparently none the less dangerous for that. In what was bound to be the final phase of her career as a writer of fiction, Eliot felt called upon to pour scorn on bad belief, as if unwilling or unable to transmute stark outrage, through make-peace make-believe, into what Neil Hertz has characterized as “those scenes of morally impeccable denunciation that have punctuated [her] fiction from the first” (122). Blame the Jews.

Virgilian Incarnation: Hartman and the Issue of Auerbach's Jewishness

In his memoir A Scholar’s Tale, Geoffrey Hartman recognizes the decisive influence of Erich Auerbach, one of his teachers at Yale, on his own early work. Auerbach came to Yale after having spent the Second World War in Istanbul, where he wrote his magisterial Mimesis. That book not only bears the stamp of the war that was then ravaging Europe, the continent whose literary heritage he aimed to preserve in Mimesis, but also of a second trauma: the demise, somewhere (according to Auerbach) in between Dante and Montaigne, of a divinely sanctioned reality, which condemned the West to the historical world. For Auerbach, what saved this historical reality was the unfulfilled figure of the Incarnation still haunting it against all odds... The influence of Auerbach’s sense of lateness, and of the autumnal literary ethos it sustains, can be traced in Hartman’s lifelong engagement with William Wordsworth, whose exemplary remediation of the loss of rural life, Hartman recognizes, today threatens to fade away in our increasingly networked memory-and mediascapes. It is significant that in the last three decades, Hartman has supplemented his Romanticism and his work on the memory of the Holocaust with an increasingly explicit elaboration of the Jewish imagination. Does this point to the perceived insufficiency of Auerbach’s autumnal stance? Or does the tension between the literary, the disaster, and the religious point to an ethos beyond Incarnation?

Bildung and the State in the Long Nineteenth Century

The relations between literature and the political community have figured prominently on the research agenda in the humanities in the last few decades. The tension between political power and its different rhetorical and literary figurations can be productively explored by focusing on the juncture of two prominent nineteenth-century discourses: those relying on notions of Bildung (a term capturing processes of self-development and organic growth) and the state (which often denotes those aspects of power that cannot be couched in a naturalizing rhetoric of the nation or, indeed, Bildung). This forum traces the mobilization of figures of Bildung for the legitimation of political power in the paradigmatic genre of the Bildungsroman as well as in novelistic, biological, utopian, architectural, educational, and journalistic discourses.