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Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14288/6
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Publication Open Access Ottoman literature as Mediterranean literature: travel, imperialism, and c omparison in Hac Yolunda by Cenab Şahabeddin(Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta, 2019) Department of Comparative Literature; Arslan, Ceylan Ceyhun; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 280297The Mediterranean did not receive enough attention in research and scholarship on Ottoman literature, which has often been studied either as the precursor of modern Turkish literature or as a part of Islamic Middle Eastern literatures. Likewise, Ottoman literature did not receive significant attention in those branches of Mediterranean studies that have foregrounded interactions between Europe and the Maghreb. This article calls for an examination of representations of the Mediterranean in Ottoman texts, as well as the envisioning of Ottoman literature as Mediterranean literature. As a case study, I will be analysing a late Ottoman travelogue, the Hac Yolunda (On the Hajj Route; 1909) by Cenab Şahabeddin (1870–1934), a pioneering figure in Ottoman literature. I argue that the Mediterranean as a heuristic device can orient critics of Ottoman literature toward comparative and theoretical approaches that engage with fundamental debates in postcolonial studies and world literature.Publication Open Access Spolia and textual reincarnations: a reassessment of the Hagia Sophia’s history(Brepols Publishers, 2021) Department of Comparative Literature; Arslan, Ceylan Ceyhun; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 280297A study of literary representations of buildings leads to intersections of comparative literature and art history. This article uses two concepts from spolia studies, “reincarnation” and “afterlife” to argue that the forms that a building adopts in literature can be considered textual reincarnations. It analyzes, as a case study, descriptions of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople/Istanbul in literary works from authors such as Paul the Silentiary (d. 575–580), Taşlıcalı Yahya Bey (d. 1582), and Edmondo de Amicis (1846–1908). The history seen through the Hagia Sophia’s textual reincarnations constitutes an alternative to its mainstream history, which has often considered its conversions to a mosque and a museum as the sole turning points. Although they may have no overt connections to the building’s original architectural structure, textual reincarnations of a building can still provide crucial insights into its reception in everchanging contexts.Publication Open Access On the possibility of multiculturalism: birds without wings by Louis de Berniéres(2021) Department of Comparative Literature; Ağıl, Nazmi; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 50749At the beginning of the twentieth century a great number of non-Muslim population were driven out of the newly defined borders of the Turkish Republic. In Birds Without Wings, Louis de Berniéres questions the validity of the concepts like race, religion and language as the criteria for nation-building, and laments the loss of an Edenic life-style in an Anatolian town, when its Greek and Armenian inhabitants left. What made life there so good was the long-established multicultural relations, which the writer recreates for us. Hence, this article claims that at the heart of Birds Without Wings lies the concept of “multiculturalism” and points out to the way the dynamic relations connoted by the term are reflected through the novel’s formal and narrative aspects, such as chapter design, changing point of view, mixing genres and languages, and the symbolic use of names.Publication Open Access Derrida's otobiographies(University of Hawaii Press, 2017) Department of Comparative Literature; Ergin, Meliz; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 101428Publication Open Access Turkish censorship, cultural translation, and the trial of William S. Burroughs's the soft machine(University of Arizona (AU) Press, 2016) Department of Comparative Literature; Mortenson, Erik; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and HumanitiesPublication Open Access Reimagining the epic: historical and collective memory in Nâzım Hikmet and Pablo Neruda(Hacettepe Üniversitesi, 2016) Department of Comparative Literature; Dolcerocca, Özen Nergis; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 237469This article explores historical and collective memory in Nazim Hikmet’s Human Landscapes from My Country and Pablo Neruda’s Canto General, bringing these two books of poetry together in their pursuit of a new epic poetry in the aftermath of the Second World War. Hikmet’s Landscapes is a collection of poems in the form of a biographical dictionary that profiles ordinary people’s lives in an encyclopedic manner. The poem is an account of the history of the twentieth century from the perspectives of multiple characters in Turkey. It presents an alternative history centered on the lives of ordinary people, bringing human experience into the center of the historical narrative that spans nearly half a century from 1908 to 1950, with a vast geographic sweep from villages of Anatolia to Europe and Moscow. In 1950, the year Hikmet completed Landscapes, Pablo Neruda published Canto General, meaning General Song, in Mexico City, another extensive and unorthodox artistic project driven by the ambition to tell all; it is a general/communal song, about an entire history of a continent and of the world. Despite many differences in their works, the poetry of Hikmet and Neruda carry significant parallels that deepens our understanding of the poetry of engagement in the twentieth century. In this article, I discuss the epic elements in Nâzım’s Human Landscapes in relation to its political function as a critical historical memory, and at the same time, by drawing parallels from Neruda’s work I aim to place Landscapes in an international literary perspective. In his pursuit of a new epic, Hikmet created a poetic masterpiece that recounts the history of people through multiple perspectives, bringing together the past, present and future around the destiny of millions of human beings. Pablo Neruda also pursued a similar desire to give expression to a wide landscape and collective populace of America and created Canto General to satisfy “the need for a new epic poetry”. This expression of necessity to turn to the epic genre reveals both poets’ ambition to capture the community in its totality. This paper shows that Neruda’s struggle echoes that of Hikmet who seeks to find a new voice that would revolutionize modern poetry in its embrace of the epic and to create a sweeping chronicle which spans time and space, history and geography to form a self-contained vision of a country and its people.Publication Open Access From Vienna to the Kalmyk lands: the construction of place in the Seyahatnâme(Harvard University Press, 2015) Department of Comparative Literature; Kim, Sooyong; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and HumanitiesIn the past few decades, scholars have pointed to the importance of a travel account’s very spatial setting in the construction and representation of place, in marking out the cultural and political boundaries. Yet that aspect has been little explored when it comes to Ottoman travel writing, especially from the early modern era. This article examines the role of spatial setting in the construction of place in Evliyâ Çelebi’s Seyahatname, of Vienna and the Kalmyk lands in particular, two places outside the Ottoman imperial realm. The accounts illustrate how greatly the specificity of each place in the Ottoman territorial imagination defines Evliya’s depiction of those locales. For Evliyâ, it is argued, Vienna and the Kalmyks lands represent two wholly different and exclusive foreign places: the former is constructed as an urban space beneficial to Ottoman material interest, and the latter as a pastoral space without such benefit.Publication Open Access AfriKI: machine-in-the-loop Afrikaans poetry generation(Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2021) Baş, Anıl; Department of Comparative Literature; van Heerden, Imke; Other; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 318142This paper proposes a generative language model called AfriKI. Our approach is based on an LSTM architecture trained on a small corpus of contemporary fiction. With the aim of promoting human creativity, we use the model as an authoring tool to explore machine-in-the-loop Afrikaans poetry generation. To our knowledge, this is the first study to attempt creative text generation in Afrikaans.Publication Open Access Physician writers: hysteric poetry and the medicinal novel in Hayal ve Hakikat(Akdeniz University, 2019) Department of Comparative Literature; Arslan, Ceylan Ceyhun; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 280297When the novel genre began to become popular in the Ottoman Empire, many authors such as Ahmet Midhat emphasized that the novel was fundamental for society. These writers made use of “non-literary” discourses, such as medicine, and formed a new value system for literature. To demonstrate the engagement of these writers with medicine, a close reading of Hayal ve Hakikat (Imagination and Truth; 1891) is provided, which was co-written by Ahmet Midhat and Fatma Aliye. In particular, the article analyzes the “Hysteria” section of Hayal ve Hakikat and historically contextualizes it through examining both the literary criticism and the medical works that were produced in the nineteenth century. It shows that some Ottoman writers who lived when the work was composed depict medicine and/or science as an ideal for literature, and it is argued that these depictions have shaped critical judgments on genres such as poetry and the novel. These writers could foreground the “seriousness” of the new literature through comparing the old divan poetry with a woman or a sick person. This article shows the intersections between the history of literature and the history of science at a time when the novel could be considered the source of a cure. / Roman türü Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda yaygınlaşmaya başladığında, Ahmet Midhat Efendi gibi pek çok yazar bu türün toplum için elzem olduğunu vurguladı. Bu yazarlar ayrıca tıp gibi “edebî olmayan” söylemlerden faydalanarak edebiyat için yeni bir değerler sistemi oluşturdu. Onların tıp ile etkileşimini ana hatlarıyla gösterebilmek için Ahmet Midhat Efendi’nin ve Fatma Aliye’nin ortak çalışması Hayal ve Hakikat (1891) eserinin yakın okumasını yapacağım. Makalem, Hayal ve Hakikat’teki “Histeri” kısmını tahlil edecek ve bu kısmı on dokuzuncu yüzyılda yazılmış eleştiri yazıları ile tıp kitaplarını inceleyerek tarihî bir bağlama oturtacaktır. Böylece, eserin yazıldığı dönemde yaşayan bazı yazarların tıbbı ve/veya fenni edebiyatın ulaşması gereken ideal olarak tasvir ettiğini vurgulayacak ve bu tasvirlerin şiir ve roman gibi türler hakkındaki değer yargılarını şekillendirdiğini savunacaktır. Bu yazarlar, yeni edebiyatın “ciddiliğini” ön plana çıkarmak adına divan şiirini bir kadına veya hastaya benzetirler. Makalem, romanın şifa kaynağı olarak algılanabildiği bir dönemin bilim tarihi ve edebiyat tarihi arasındaki kesişimleri gösterecektir.Publication Open Access OttMed: understanding the Mediterranean through comparative literature(European Dissemination Media Agency (EDMA), 2020) Department of Comparative Literature; Arslan, Ceylan Ceyhun; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 280297