Criticism
Several common critical objections to Auerbach’s essay have been that the passages he chose for close reading were not sufficiently representative of the two texts. Some scholars maintain, instead, that the poetry (rather than the prose ) of the Old Testament would be more appropriate for comparison to Homer's verse.
Unsurprisingly, much of the criticism of this essay has come from classicists, many of them finding Auerbach's reading of The Odyssey overly simplistic. Another argument is that Auerbach failed to take into account that the Odyssey may have been the written record of an orally told work, and that therefore the reality it represents is not the story of Odysseus, but rather the telling of the story of Odysseus. Such an interpretation would perhaps partly account for the work’s thoroughly-articulated and background-less style.
Although Auerbach explicitly states in his essay that he chose the particular texts of the Odyssey and the Old Testament because of their subsequent influence on Western literature, some scholars have questioned whether he may also have had political motivations for writing a piece comparing a sacred Jewish text to the Odyssey, perhaps by using it as an analogy for the conflict between Judeo-Christian tradition and the Aryan Nazism flourishing in Europe at the time of Mimesis’ writing.
Read more about this topic: Odysseus' Scar (Auerbach)
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