Publications with Fulltext
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 Viewpoint: AI as author - bridging the gap between machine learning and literary theory(AI Access Foundation, 2021) Baş, Anıl; Department of Comparative Literature; van Heerden, Imke; Other; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 318142Anticipating the rise in Artificial Intelligence's ability to produce original works of literature, this study suggests that literariness, or that which constitutes a text as literary, is understudied in relation to text generation. From a computational perspective, literature is particularly challenging because it typically employs figurative and ambiguous language. Literary expertise would be beneficial to understanding how meaning and emotion are conveyed in this art form but is often overlooked. We propose placing experts from two dissimilar disciplines -machine learning and literary studies- in conversation to improve the quality of AI writing. Concentrating on evaluation as a vital stage in the text generation process, the study demonstrates that benefit could be derived from literary theoretical perspectives. This knowledge would improve algorithm design and enable a deeper understanding of how AI learns and generates.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 Introduction: gender, migration, and the media(Taylor _ Francis, 2018) Mattoscio, Mara; Department of Comparative Literature; MacDonald, Megan Catherine; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and HumanitiesPublication 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.