Erich Auerbach's "Mimesis" and Nelson Goodman's "Ways of Worldmaking": A Nominal(ist) Revision

Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Erich Auerbach's "Mimesis" and Nelson Goodman's "Ways of Worldmaking": A Nominal(ist)RevisionAuthor(s): Barry MaineSource: Poetics Today, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 41-52Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773342 .

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Erich Auerbach's Mimesis and Nelson Goodman's Ways of Worldmaking: A Nominal(ist) Revision

Barry Maine English, Wake Forest

Abstract Many critics have followed Ren6 Wellek's lead in denying any explicit theoretical basis for Auerbach's interpretations of Western literature and in chal-

lenging the consistency of Auerbach's use of the term realism. This threatens to per- petuate a fundamental misunderstanding of Auerbach's achievement in Mimesis, one rooted in a failure to recognize the constructionist nature of Auerbach's interpretive methodology, which lends coherence and unity to his critical practice, including his

descriptive rather than ontological use of realism. Auerbach's constructionist practice is more readily apparent if we compare it to Nelson Goodman's nominalist poetics. Auerbach's philological and comparativist approach to literature subtly underscores the extent to which he, like Goodman, apprehends the reality of social worlds revealed by texts as worlds constructed by those texts, and constructed in ways that can and do influence the social worlds that later writers construct. Therefore, the nominalist "revision" that would substitute "constructed" for "represented" reality in the subtitle to Mimesis would indeed be nominal rather than substantive because of (1) the primary emphasis Auerbach gives to the literary text over the social world it

organizes, (2) the philological basis of his interpretation of that text, and (3) his conclusion that the individual case is primary because meaning and order are always "individual" matters.

Rene Wellek, in his critique of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis for the Kenyon Review (1954), and later in his influential History of Modern Criticism, vol. 7 (1991), praised the book for its ambitious scope and wide-ranging erudi-

Poetics Today 20:1 (Spring 1999). Copyright ? 1999 by the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics.



42 Poetics Today 20:1

tion but objected to Auerbach's critical practice on three counts: (1) the absence of any explicit theoretical framework for Auerbach's interpretations of literature, which, in Wellek's view, lends itself to idiosyncratic and impressionistic judgments; (2) the slippery nature of Auerbach's use of the term "realism"; and (3) Auerbach's historicist rather than existential approach to human existence, which results, according to Wellek, in a "profound skepticism" of human freedom and value. These objections are well worth our consideration, for they strike at the heart of Auerbach's achievement in Mimesis, and reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of Auerbach's concept of realism. Viewed in the context of the nominalist

poetics of the philosopher Nelson Goodman, Auerbach's concept of realism in Mimesis takes on a decidedly constructionist character, and Wellek's

objections should be revised accordingly. In his review, Wellek (1991 [1954]: 119) contends that "there is no phi-

lology without a network of generalizations, nor can any kind of discourse on literature be carried on except in conceptual terms.... Auerbach, to

my mind, relies too much on a contextual process of definition." Indeed, Auerbach (ibid.) let it be known that he wished it were possible to avoid

"general expressions" entirely and instead demonstrate his ideas about the

development of Western literature simply by using illustrations. Wellek holds such a view to be naive as a principle, for it ignores the degree to which all approaches to literature are grounded in theoretical assumptions about literary meaning, and dangerous in practice, for it invests so much

authority in "close readings" that the critic runs the risk of responding idio-

syncratically and impressionistically by failing to take into account his own

modernity and the particular values, interests, and experiences he brings to the text. In Mimesis, Auerbach deduces from the stylistic characteristics-what he calls the philology-of the literary text (its syntax, diction, structure, point of view, tone, etc.), or, in other words, from the author's narrative strategies for representing human experience, the author's attitudes toward it, and he explicitly or implicitly locates those attitudes in the culture that produced them. In Wellek's view, Auerbach ignores the extent to which a text's formal features can be described differently by different readers in different times and cultures according to what appeals to and interests them. Consequently, though Auerbach (1953: 329) can take issue with Goethe's reading of Hamlet as "a stylistic mirror of his own time," he

appears to be blind to the mote in his own eye, namely, that his own con-

cept of realism is glaringly modern in the emphasis he places on historical forces at work in individual choice. Wellek also contends that Auerbach's use of the term realism is not only modern but inconsistent. Wellek com-

plains that the concept is "existential" as applied to premodern literary



Maine * A Nominal(ist) Revision 43

texts, and "social-historic" when applied to modern ones. Thus Auerbach's

yardstick for measuring realism changes as he applies it to different texts.

Finally, Wellek (1991 [1954]: 120) objects to what he perceives as Auer- bach's commitment to "extreme historical relativism" and his apparent preference for literature which represents human experience as historically determined rather than existentially free, which Wellek interprets as a re-

jection of "human freedom and the greatness of man's self-assertion in the face of history and its forces."

Are there really such serious and compromising flaws in Auerbach's critical practice, or has Wellek misunderstood both the nature of Auer- bach's historicism and his concept of realism? I propose to answer this

question by exposing the fallacy in Wellek's contention that Auerbach's historicism necessarily contradicts existentialism or compromises his for- malism to the degree that Wellek claims it does. I shall also insist that the

inconsistency in Auerbach's concept of realism exists only if we confuse, as I believe Wellek does, realism in an ontological sense with realism in a representational sense. The former implies a set of assumptions about

"being" whereas the latter is only a classification, or category of depictions of it. To clarify this crucial issue, I will turn for help to Nelson Goodman.

Although Goodman may be best known in philosophy for his contribu- tions to inductive theory, he has also written extensively about the symbol systems humans employ (linguistic, pictorial, mathematical, etc.) to describe and understand the world and their experience of it. In two of his earliest essays, "A World of Individuals" (1956) and "The Way the World Is" (1960), Goodman staked out a position he has never abandoned: that there has never been any "way the world is" independent of descriptions of it. Goodman expanded and developed his ideas about representation in

Languages of Art (1968) and in journal articles with such revealing titles as "Routes of Reference (1981)," "The Status of Style (1975a)," and "Words, Works, Worlds (1975b)." Many of his views on representation are summed

up in Ways of Worldmaking (1978). As a nominalist, Goodman believes that all categories of organization and classification, in all the arts and sci- ences, are affected by discourse conceived within and from specific frames of reference. We must give up "any notion of a reality consisting of objects and events and kinds established independently of discourse and unaffected by how they are described or otherwise presented" (1981: 130). Thus no set of assumptions about "being" can be unaffected by descriptions of it, including silent, unwritten, but nevertheless linguistic efforts to explain experience to ourselves.

My understanding of Goodman's nominalism is that it recognizes the raw existence of things and events but holds that these have no meaning,




definition, or identity that is not affected by what we say about them; and what we say about them, the categories or classifications we give them- such as the classification of literary texts as examples of "modernism"-

belong not to the objects or events themselves, but to the classifying mind, as that mind is guided by habits of thinking and culture. Literary texts, like all objects and events, are subject to an endless process of reclassification and redefinition (as reflected in current efforts to re-classify literary texts as "premodern," "modern," and "postmodern"). Nominalism is distinct from positivism, on the one hand, which depends on verification, and from

idealism, on the other, which depends on universal essences. Nominalism

is, instead, most closely allied to pragmatism, which stresses what works or what satisfies us, what we find believable or useful for the moment. The nominalist sees no absolute truth in classifications or categories, but does see the utility in them. The world does exist for us in the many ways we describe it. A version of the world may hold true for so long as it "offends no unyielding beliefs and none of its own precepts" (Goodman 1978: 17).

What does "realism" mean to Goodman? Since our understanding of

things cannot be separated from the terms in which -or the symbol system by which-we understand them, "realism," for Goodman, is a category of

descriptions. It is a relative term Goodman uses to classify styles of depiction. The classification always occurs in a historical context, and realism is

always a quality relative to other styles of depiction. Considered as such, "realism," according to Goodman (ibid.: 130), can take one of two forms:

(1) conformity in style to an established system of representation that "cor- relates loosely with ordinary judgments of resemblance, which . . . rest

upon habit," and with other commonly accepted notions of what it is like to live in the world described; or (2) a significant break with convention and tradition that constructs a previously unexpressed (though not nec-

essarily unknown or unexperienced) aspect or characteristic of living in

a world. The first kind of realism reflects the status quo, repeats conven-

tion, and survives by inertia; the second type revolts against convention and lives by invention. This second type of realism, though it may bring into awareness an aspect of being that had yet to be expressed, remains a

category of description denoted by significant departures from culturally normative representational strategies. Any resemblance between "being" and depictions of it, as between symbol and reference, as between the lit-

erary text and the world it may seek to represent, is inherently unstable, because what counts or qualifies as resemblance is itself heavily dependent upon custom and culture, and just as crucially because resemblance is in

every case an imaginative act of the mind seeking grounds for resemblance rather than an objective fact independent of human cognition. There are




traditions of resembling things and events, or of representing our experience of them, and there are bold experiments in aesthetic representation; but experiments and conventions alike, of literary or of other forms of aesthetic representation, belong to the vehicle of representation, and conform to its features rather than to the features of the world represented.

In With Reference to Reference, a very useful book on Goodman's work, Catherine Elgin (1983: 193) summarizes his position as follows: "We seek

[language] systems that organize things in ways that are interesting and informative, subtle and suggestive, powerful and perspicacious . ., [systems] that enable us to reconceive our domains in ways that reveal significant features which earlier systems [of representation] had obscured." The "significant features" are of "being" that literature seeks to name, de-

scribe, or depict. Depiction helps to define experience as much as it may reflect it. Experience, individually and collectively, is the only arbiter of

any "truth" in representation. It seems to me that, in many respects, Auerbach in Mimesis anticipates

the nominalist poetics and even illustrates the constructionist position of Goodman's Ways of Worldmaking. If, as Goodman argues, the organization of a discourse participates significantly in the organization of any reality, then Mimesis certainly illustrates that fact by describing the organization of discourse in selected texts of European literature, and by elucidating and demonstrating exactly how new worlds are made. One of Auerbach's

objectives in Mimesis was to demonstrate how the development of literary traditions in general, and the doctrine of genres and styles appropriate to

high and low subjects in particular, obscured certain significant aspects of human existence, and most notably, according to Auerbach, participation in a historical process by individuals at all levels of society. A related

objective was to show how literature participates in defining human ex-

perience for its readers. It requires only a cursory glance at Auerbach's critical practice to realize that the aesthetics of literary form as "ways of

worldmaking" hold center stage in Mimesis. This is the case in virtually every chapter in which the analysis of a literary style directs his argument about cultural experience and expression and in which each literary style is approached as one of the two types of representational realism outlined above in Goodman's nominalist poetics (with the second type accounting for what Auerbach sees as the "progress" of realism).

Is Auerbach guilty of constructing patterns that reflect his own reading and experience? Certainly, for there is, as he acknowledges, "always going on within us a process of formulation and interpretation whose subject is our own self" (1953: 549). What is most remarkable in Mimesis is the extent of Auerbach's learning and the number and variety of literary texts




he is able to bring into meaningful relation. Is he also guilty of construct-

ing the formal features of each text without regard to his own moment as a historically situated reader? There is no immunity from historicism or

subjectivity in any absolute sense, but we should take note of the fact that the accuracy of descriptive statements about material objects is generally less vulnerable to subjectivism and historical change than most other kinds of statements. For example, Wellek's use of the term existentialism as a de-

scriptive statement of "being," and his quaint assertion that historicism is the creed of only a few, mostly German, scholars, historically situates his own review of Mimesis. On the other hand, Mimesis itself will never have more than twenty chapters and an epilogue and will never exchange its

language, focus, or method for any other. I do not mean to suggest that all readers in all times will describe the features of a symbolic language in

exactly the same way. Descriptive statements about literary texts are not

irrefutable; they are only as true as each reader's experience of those texts will confirm. Even so, experience has shown that the linguistic features of a

literary text (like the visual characteristics of a painting) are much less open to debate than their meaning or significance. Accordingly, Auerbach's

comparativist statements that literary style Xis different from literary style r are not so subjective or so subject to historical change as Wellek claims. Neither are such comparisons invalidated by different and competing de-

scriptions of X and Y; they remain valid for any reader who experiences the qualities in each text that Auerbach has identified. And if we accept the nominalist position, that it is "by means of multiple symbol functions and

systems [that] we create and comprehend the worlds we live in" (Goodman 1981: 132), then we can better understand and appreciate why Auerbach

pays the attention he does to the formal features of a literary style. In other words, Auerbach's comparativist approach underscores the con-

siderable extent--and it is considerable--to which he sees the reality of

worlds revealed by texts as worlds constructed by those texts. A single ex-

ample from Mimesis should make my point. The now famous contrasts Auerbach brought to light between the foregrounding of events and their

meanings, as well as the absence of psychological development, in The

Odyssey, and the complex layering of meaning and events, and the emphasis on the "historically becoming," in the Old Testament, are presented as

differences, first and last, in narrative styles. Auerbach has very little to

say about Greek or Hebrew culture apart from each text's participation in our understanding of it. He does not dwell on how a world makes a text but on how a text makes a world. His history is a history of literary styles. If Auerbach does not speculate on the stylistic origins of such radically different approaches to narrative representation, it is presumably because



Maine ? A Nominal(ist) Revision 47

of the absence of known literary precedents; instead, he emphasizes the seminal quality of these texts in the subsequent development of European literature, as in the influence of the Bible (through Medieval "figuration" and later psychological realism) upon subsequent European representational practice, which Auerbach brilliantly explores and confirms. Reality, in other words, is conceived in the form of its most compelling expressions. This is what Mimesis shows us. There are worlds in the making in these texts.

"Realism," then, as a category of descriptions, is inherently and nec-

essarily contextual because it designates ways of organizing experience which writers and readers, historically situated, find compelling for a va-

riety of reasons. For example, Auerbach surmises that the Homeric text

encouraged its audience to escape its own historical reality as it listened to the poem, whereas the biblical text sought to define and appropriate it. The Homeric poem obeys the laws of its own epic conventions, does not

depart from the realm of the legendary, arranges its material in a straight- forward manner detached from any contemporary historical context, and "knows only clearly outlined men who act from few and simple motives and the continuity of whose feelings and actions remains uninterrupted" (Auerbach 1953: 19). The implication is clear: There are significant aspects of "being" which The Odyssey does not reenact, such as what it is like to live in a state of historical or psychological becoming. What is absent in The Odyssey is present not only in Auerbach's own experience of being (which, as a reference point, begs the question of "universals") but materially in another text from the ancient world, the Old Testament. This text obeys narrative conventions of its own that present us with a represented reality different from The Odyssey by virtue of its more profound historicism, one defined not only by its claim to be historical (which, after all, is also the implicit claim of The Odyssey) but by a structuring of events that emphasizes contradictory motives, ambiguity of meaning, and individual change and psychological development.

Wellek contends that Auerbach's definition of realism as it is applied to both The Odyssey and the Bible is "existentially" rather than "historically" derived (in contrast to the "social-historic" concept of realism Auerbach applies to modern texts), presumably because the measure of realism in this first chapter would appear to be aspects of "being" that Auerbach seems to regard as universal. But there is no inconsistency here so long as we are careful--more so than either Wellek or Auerbach-to differen- tiate clearly between realism in a representational sense and realism in an ontological one. Whether he is writing about ancient or modern texts, Auerbach never wavers from his conviction that all conceptions of human




nature are born and understood in the context of history. For him, all human experience at all times, and all the literature that represents it, exists in a state of becoming. (What that "becoming" is can only be ob- served, or interpreted, in hindsight; so to argue, as Auerbach does, that all events and human choices occur in a historical context is not the same as

saying that such events and choices are historically determined, as Wellek

implies.) This paradox is indeed central to Mimesis: Historicism is a universal condition of being, one of the few Auerbach insists upon. (Another, related condition is that consciousness is inherently subjective.) Accord-

ingly, Auerbach is also consistent in his insistence on the "historically be-

coming" as one important kind of "progress" in representational realism. But he identifies many forms and varieties of representational realism in Western literature, from styles of depiction that display culturally normative patterns of representation to those that break with those patterns, because there are many and diverse aspects of human experience constructed in diverse ways by the literary texts he examines. His bias in favor of representations that depict human experiences as essentially developmental reflects not merely his own set of assumptions about being but the fact that such depictions have significantly influenced later styles of representation.

Auerbach's primary (and consistent) focus throughout Mimesis is on how

literary texts construct reality in similar or different ways. If we were to search the first chapter of Mimesis for a historical basis to his sense of what it is like to live in the real world of time and history as opposed to the stylized world of epic, we would find it stated explicitly only in the texts themselves as they are described by him, and contained implicitly in his own assumptions about being. This is perfectly consistent with Goodman's nominalism and forms the blueprint for all the remaining chapters of Mimesis, even when the claim that differences in style are rooted in differences in culture is made more forcefully than it is in the first chapter. Though such claims seem to be substantiated only circularly, since Auerbach does not write about culture independent of its literary representations, this makes perfect sense from a nominalist position. What are "exemplified," to borrow Good- man's term, by each "sample" (each literary passage selected and analyzed by Auerbach) are, first and foremost, formal characteristics of the text, and secondarily, characteristics of culture (what Goodman calls "labels"

applied to collective experience) that participated in its production. Let us consider a second example. In "The Weary Prince," a chapter

on Elizabethan drama, Auerbach asks why "character" plays a larger role in shaping human destiny in Elizabethan tragedy than it does in its clas- sical Greek ancestor. He points out that in Elizabethan tragedy the hero's character traits, situation, and history are developed in much greater de-




tail than in Greek tragedy, and outside intervention (in the form of divine action or simply events in the plot) plays a much smaller role. Auerbach

(1953: 320) answers his own question by citing the pervasive influence of the Christian concept of moral agency, a weakening of religious faith dur-

ing the sixteenth century, and the "comparatively high level of historical consciousness and perspective" among Elizabethan playwrights and audi- ences relative to their Greek counterparts. Such explanations reveal the circular nature of Auerbach's critical practice, for they no doubt derive from Shakespeare and other representations of the English Renaissance.

They amount to cultural "labels" exemplified by those representations. The knowledge of historical culture that Auerbach draws upon to explain how and why texts are organized the way they are is derived from texts. For a nominalist like Goodman, this is simply a "given"; it merely reenacts how we know the world. Even the increasing level of historical perspective and consciousness encoded in Renaissance texts had to originate some- where, and representations must have been crucially involved.

There is another key aspect of Auerbach's critical practice which Wellek has overlooked in his determination to take issue with its historicism: what Auerbach is most effective at demonstrating is how worlds are made dif-

ferently by the authors of texts. Nominalism is a philosophy that favors the individual case. It is time to examine the case of the individual author in the context of Auerbach's historicism. In his introductory chapter to Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages (1965), Auerbach summarizes Mimesis as a project that used the evolution of literary forms to write history. "The general conception that can be set forth," he writes, "is that of an historical process, a kind of drama, which advances no theory but only sketches a certain pattern of human destiny" (21). The destiny in question here, I would argue, is that of European representational practice, a pattern of changing conceptions of reality. Are these changing conceptions historically determined, or are they themselves determinants of cultural change and understanding? It is more than

merely hedging to say that they are both at once. Changing conceptions of reality are expressive of and contribute to a culture; they are forged in the crucible of the individual artist's imagination, historically situated. Consider the example of Dante who, according to Auerbach (1953: 183) performed "a well-nigh incomprehensible miracle": "His style is so immeasurably richer [than that of all the poets who preceded him] in direct- ness, vigor, and subtlety, he knows and uses such an immeasurably greater stock of forms, he expresses the most varied phenomena and subjects with such immeasurably superior assurance and firmness, that we come to the conclusion that this man used his language to discover the world anew."




Similarly, Auerbach found it "astonishing" and "almost miraculous" that the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico could write and publish Scienza nuova (1725), which proclaims that we can only know and judge events ac-

cording to our own experience, long before the conditions which produced European Romanticism ever came into being. Auerbach (1965: 188-90) can only attribute this to "the particular quality of the author's mind." Such statements, by confronting us with the mystery and transcendence of human thought and creativity, challenge Wellek's claim that Auerbach's historicism is opposed to existential freedom.

Although Auerbach argues that there are ways of organizing experience that are characteristic of a period, he is just as keen to demonstrate how each new way of organizing experience is characteristic of a particular writer. What does the creative mind imitate and where are its wellsprings? Contrary to Wellek's contention, Auerbach does not answer these ques- tions deterministically. Instead, he offers a series of object lessons in sup- port of the nominalist theory of how worlds are made by the conventions and inventions of language. For example, he treats the philological characteristics of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, which include the "contrast between exterior and interior time," narrative lacunae, multiple shifts in

point of view, and the representation of "consciousness unrestrained by purpose or directed by a specific object of thought" (1953: 538), as strate-

gies for representing subjective aspects of human consciousness which, to

quote Elgin (1983: 193) on Goodman again, "previous systems of narrative organization had failed to disclose." Throughout Mimesis Auerbach demonstrates his interest in how language organizes and constructs social worlds and psychological states.

Auerbach's commentary on Flaubert's Madame Bovary is a final case in

point. The comparativist approach foregrounds differences in narrative method. Auerbach places Flaubert's novel in the context of other sym- bolically functioning narrative systems-specifically novels by Stendhal and Balzac- demonstrating how Flaubert's narrative method imagines as-

pects of contemporary French life that novels by Stendhal and Balzac do not and cannot. Before Flaubert, an everyday scene between husband and wife over dinner would have been conceivable as a subject for literature

only as part of a comic tale, idyll, or satire. Such a claim is well substantiated by Auerbach's historical approach to literary forms. He claims that Flaubert was only able to invest such a subject with tragic significance thanks to the development of romanticism, which in the nominalist lexi- con would be a name for a significant development in representational practice -another well-substantiated claim in Auerbach's literary history. On the other hand, Auerbach's assertion that Flaubert's representation of




contemporary French life is "more objective, impersonal, and impartial" than Balzac's is impossible to substantiate because there is no reliable measure of such "objectivity." It is significant, however, that Auerbach does not base his claim on social history, but on narrative strategy as its own way of knowing. He shows how Flaubert locates description in a sensibility, a point of view, as in Emma Bovary's despairing view of her life with her husband, Charles. Flaubert describes the world as Emma would feel it. Auerbach (1953: 485) describes the narrative method as one in which Emma "does not simply see, but is herself seen as one seeing, and is thus judged simply through a plain description of her subjective life." Flaubert himself, as much as any social history, made the modern novel possible.

I believe that Auerbach would agree with Flaubert (1973: 31) that "style itself is an absolute manner of viewing things." Accordingly, he approaches literary style as the product of the author's attitude toward the reality of the world he represents. Flaubert's attitude he defines as one of "objective seriousness . . . which seeks to penetrate to the depths of the passions and entanglements of a human life, but without betraying that it is moved" (Auerbach 1953: 490). Flaubert's style reveals a life that "flows viscously and sluggishly," not a life of "tempestuous passions" but of "prolonged chronic states" (ibid.). My point is that Auerbach's critical practice reveals a belief that the possibilities open to the writer determine the portrayal of human consciousness, possibilities which derive from combinations of cultural inheritance and individual creativity; reality, in other words, is made, not found, by these texts, and made in ways which influence what later writers can or will make. Mimesis shows us that literature does not merely reflect or mirror but also participates in the creation of a multi- varied reality. In the final chapter of Mimesis, Auerbach admits that, for him, meaning and order have always been individual matters, which is one of the reasons why the style of the modern novel interests him for placing that meaning and order in the individual consciousness.

Though Vico's name is mentioned only a few times in Mimesis, one cannot overstate his profound influence on Auerbach's conception of human experience and practice of literary criticism. Auerbach would not go so far as to accept Vico's cyclical view of history but, like Vico, he did believe that "the nature of things is nothing else than the birth of these things in certain points and in a certain manner" (quoted in Auerbach 1965: 9). Vico, it turns out, not only holds the key to Auerbach's historicism but provides the link between that historicism and Goodman's nominalism, the link between Mimesis and Ways of Worldmaking. Vico insisted that "we can know for certain only that which we ourselves have made or created. For while the mind apprehends itself, it does not make itself, and because it does




not make itself, it is ignorant of the form or mode by which it apprehends itself." Understanding mathematics, to cite an example used by Vico, is not the same as understanding the natural phenomena we apply it to. What is "true" in mathematics is only true to the degree that it is consistent with the laws of mathematics. In other words, human understanding always occurs within the context of a symbolic language invented for that purpose. By demonstrating in Mimesis how "we are constantly endeavoring to

give meaning and order to our lives in the past, the present, and the future, to our surroundings, the world in which we live," Auerbach (1953: 549) also demonstrates how language figures at the very center of that enterprise.

References

Auerbach, Erich 1953 Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, translated by Willard R.

Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). 1965 Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, translated

by Ralph Manheim (New York: Pantheon Books). Edwards, Paul, ed.

1967 The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 8 vols. (New York: Macmillan). Elgin, Catherine

1983 With Reference to Reference (Indianapolis: Hackett). Flaubert, Gustave

1973 Correspondance, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard). Goodman, Nelson

1956 "A World of Individuals," in The Problem of Universals (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press).

1960 "The Way the World Is," Review of Metaphysics 14: 48-56. 1966 The Structure of Appearance (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill). 1968 Languages ofArt (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill). 1975a "The Status of Style," Critical Inquiry l: 799-811. 1975b "Words, Works, Worlds," Erkenntnis 9: 57-73. 1978 Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett). 1981 "Routes of Reference," Critical Inquiry 8: 121-32.

Vico, Giambattista 1914 Opere, vol. 1 (Bari, Italy: G. Laterza).

Wellek, Rene 1991 [1954] "The Scholar-Critics in the Romance Literatures," in A History of Modern

Criticism, vol. 7 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Originally published as "Auerbach's Special Realism" in Kenyon Review 16 (Spring 1954): 299-307.

1. Quoted from Patrick Gardner's translation of these lines from Vico 1914, 1:136, in Ed- wards 1967, 8:248.



Documents

Erich Auerbach's "Mimesis" and Nelson Goodman's "Ways of Worldmaking": A Nominal(ist) Revision