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Publication Metadata only 2 July 1993 in Turkish Literature: representations of the Sivas Massacre(Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2014) Department of Comparative Literature; Ağıl, Nazmi; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 50749On 2 July 1993 the fire set on Hotel Madimak in Sivas, Turkey by religious fanatics claimed the lives of 37 people. Such traumatic events need to be narrated to heal the wound they have opened in the public consciousness. Yet it is also true that they pose a serious challenge to the narrator as they lie beyond the reach of usual means of representation. This article examines the ways the massacre is represented in the two recent Turkish novels, Atesve Kugu (Fire and the Swan) by Burhan Gunel and Seytan Minareleri (Seashells) by Hidayet Karakus, with a view to examining the approaches these works offer to meet the challenge.Publication Metadata only 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 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 Metadata only Ambiguous borderlands: shadow imagery in cold war American culture(Southern Illinois University Press, 2016) NA; Department of Comparative Literature; Mortenson, Erik; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; N/AThe image of the shadow in mid-twentieth-century America appeared across a variety of genres and media including poetry, pulp fiction, photography, and film. Drawing on an extensive framework that ranges from Cold War cultural histories to theorizations of psychoanalysis and the Gothic, Erik Mortenson argues that shadow imagery in 1950s and 1960s American culture not only reflected the anxiety and ambiguity of the times but also offered an imaginative space for artists to challenge the binary rhetoric associated with the Cold War. After contextualizing the postwar use of shadow imagery in the wake of the atomic bomb, Ambiguous Borderlands looks at shadows in print works, detailing the reemergence of the pulp fiction crime fighter "the Shadow" in the late-1950s writings of Sylvia Plath, Amiri Baraka, and Jack Kerouac. Using Freudian and Jungian conceptions of the unconscious, Mortenson then discusses Kerouac’s and Allen Ginsberg’s shared dream of a "shrouded stranger" and how this dream shaped their Beat aesthetic. Turning to the visual, Mortenson examines the dehumanizing effect of shadow imagery in the Cold War photography of Robert Frank, William Klein, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Mortenson concludes with an investigation of the use of chiaroscuro in 1950s film noir and the popular television series The Twilight Zone, further detailing how the complexities of Cold War society were mirrored across these media in the ubiquitous imagery of light and dark. From comics to movies, Beats to bombs, Ambiguous Borderlands provides a novel understanding of the Cold War cultural context through its analysis of the image of the shadow in midcentury media. Its interdisciplinary approach, ambitious subject matter, and diverse theoretical framing make it essential reading for anyone interested in American literary and popular culture during the mid-twentieth century.Publication Metadata only An East-West conversation: Gürpınar's A Marriage under the Comet and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales(Wiley, 2018) Department of Comparative Literature; Ağıl, Nazmi; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 50749The Turkish writer Huseyin Rahmi Gurpnar's 1922 novel A Marriage under the Comet shows similarities with The Miller's Tale and The Wife of Bath's Tale from Chaucer's fourteenth-century The Canterbury Tales in terms of its subject and its characters. In the first part of the novel, Irfan, like Nicholas, makes fun of the uneducated people, frightening them with his astrological explanations and predictions. The second part of the novel, like The Wife of Bath's Tale, ends with a speech on an ideal marriage. Here too, it is advised that when choosing his/her spouse, one must value inner beauty more than appearance and that if they want a happy marriage, husbands should submit their will to their wives. The enormous interest shown the Turkish version of The Canterbury Tales, since it was translated in 1994 for the first time, might be attributed to these similarities. In the tales above, Chaucer satirizes the religious, sexual, and class culture of the English society of his age unsparingly. It is possible that Gurpnar's well-loved novel, which adapts similar stories from a different culture and time to the local context, might have played a role in preparing the relatively more conservative Turkish readers for Chaucer's work, which they would meet eighty years later. Turk yazar Huseyin Rahmi Gurpnar'n 1912'de yaynlanan Kuyruklu Yldz Altnda Bir izdivac adl roman, Chaucer'n Canterbury Hikayeleri'ned Deirmenci ve Bath'l Kadn'n anlattklar hikayelere konu ve karakter acsndan benzerlikler gosterir. Soyle ki, romann birinci bolumundeki irfan karaketri Nicholas gibi astrolojik acklamalaryla cahil insanlar korkutark elenir. ikinci bolum ise, Bath'l Kadn'n anlats gibi, ideal evlilik uzerine bir soylevle biter ve yine e seciminde karakter guzelliine baklmas, mutlu beraberlik icin kocalarn iradelerini elerine teslim etmesi tavsiye edilir. 1994 ylnda eksiksiz olarak Turkceye cevrilen Canterbury Hikayeleri'nin bunca yldr gorduu buyuk ilgi soz konusu benzerlikler uzerinden acklanabilir. Buna gore, farkl bir kulturde din, cinsiye ve snf gibi konulardaki yanllar serbest bir dille hicveden hakayeleri yerel kulture uygun balam ve uslupla yeniden anlatan Gurpnar'n bu cok sevilen roman, gorece muhafazakar yeni okur kitlesini yakla 80 yl sonra tanacaklar Canterbury Hikayeleri icin hazrlamada rol oynam olmaldr.Publication Metadata only An Ottoman holy land: two early modern travel accounts and imperial subjectivity(Purdue University Press, 2021) Bashkin, Orit; Department of Comparative Literature; Kim, Sooyong; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 52305This study investigates how the Holy Land was experienced and perceived in the early modern era, by comparing the accounts of two travelers representing distinct but complementary vantage points: Evliya Celebi (d. ca. 1685), a Sunni Muslim from Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, and Shemu'el ben David (d. 1673), a Karaite Jew from the Crimean Khanate, a vassal state on the periphery. Considering their specific views of the Holy Land and the kinds of traditions that the two contemporaries relate about the same sites they visited, we argue that both perceived the Holy Land not only through an intersecting scriptural lens, but also through a similar imperial lens that drew attention to and valorized the Ottoman presence over the sacred territory. Thus more broadly, the comparative study offers an alternative non-Eurocentric frame for exploring the relationship between empire, subject, and the holy in the early modern era.Publication Metadata only An Ottoman order of Persian verse(Brill Academic Publishers, 2019) N/A; Department of Comparative Literature; Kim, Sooyong; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 52305N/APublication Metadata only Beat Turkey: a belated influence(Routledge, 2018) NA; Department of Comparative Literature; Mortenson, Erik; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; N/AN/APublication Metadata only Canons as reservoirs: the Ottoman ocean in Ziya Pasha's Harabat and reframing the history of comparative literature(Penn State University Press, 2017) Department of Comparative Literature; Arslan, Ceylan Ceyhun; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 280297This article analyzes the introduction of Ziya Pasha's Ottoman anthology Harabat (AH 1291-1292 [1 8 74/1875-1875/1876]), which provides a comparative history of Arabic, Turkish, and Persian literatures. I argue that Harabat compiles texts from diverse geographical and temporal origins and, instead of defining them as members of distinct national traditions, projects this compilation as what I call a literary "reservoir" that constitutes the multilingual Ottoman canon. My argument draws upon Ziya Pasha's characterization of the Ottoman culture as an "ocean" that encompasses Arabic, Persian, and Turkish "streams." This description undermines the typical scholarly view that the Ottoman culture emerged and developed under Arabic and Persian influences. I then reframe our understanding of canonization through using the conceptual repertoire that the world literature scholarship has brought into literary studies-circulations, target culture, and source culture. Building upon John Guillory's work on the process of canon formation, I propose that each source text can be "deracinated" when its context is ignored in the target culture to facilitate this text's incorporation into a new canon, or "reservoir." This article finally calls for rewriting the history of comparative and world literature by demonstrating that Harabat is constitutive of the nineteenth-century comparative literature paradigm.Publication Metadata only Capturing the beat moment: cultural politics and the poetics of presence(Southern Illinois University Press, 2011) NA; Department of Comparative Literature; Mortenson, Erik; Faculty Member; Department of Comparative Literature; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; N/ACapturing the Beat Moment examines the assumptions the Beats made about the moment and their attempt to "capture" this "immediacy," focusing on the works of Kerouac and Ginsberg as well as on those of women and African American Beat writers.