Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T21:16:30.375Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Philology Went down to the Crossroads of Modernity to Meet Orientalism, Nationalism, and... Ottoman Poetry1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2015

Victoria Rowe Holbrook
Victoria Rowe Holbrook*
Affiliation:
Ohio State University, Department of Near Eastern, Judaic and Hellenic Languages and Literatures
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Ottoman poetry is an empty sign. It floats, unfettered by the correspondence between words and things conventional to the typically modern signification of historical realities. But the sign (under which many of the other written Ottoman humanities—philosophy, literary-critical writing, fine art literature, and thought in general—tend to be subsumed) is not exactly empty. It carries double, or overdetermined, meaning. Though empty of poetry the term Ottoman poetry does not, for most people, call Ottoman poetry to mind—it is full of other things in so far as the sign is “read” as a rhetorical figure, a symbol, an allegory of the national narrative. And since the middle of our century, at the latest, when the first generation born into the Turkish Republic had come of age, it has continued to be read this way. That is, the allegory continually displaces the reality. Either the poetry is not known and there is no poetry in mind to recall, or, if it is known, the experience of recall is overdetermined in ways that can be connected with the poetry only through an analysis of the history of its modern reception, probably beginning with Young Ottoman polemic c. 1860's-1880's.

Type
Articles
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 11 , fall 1994 , pp. 19 - 41
Copyright
Copyright © New Perspectives on Turkey 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

This essay has its origins in a paper I read at “The Impact of Translation,” an annual meeting of the Mid-East Literary Seminar held at Princeton University in 1991. I have also taken up the topic of modern reception of Ottoman poetry in The Unreadable Sltores of Love: Turkish Modernity and Mystic Romance (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994). There is some overlap here with parts of that book, and the reader may consult the book for more extensive bibliography and citation in support of arguments presented here.

References

Anderson, Benedict. 1983 (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Andrews, Walter G. 1985. Poetry's Voice, Society's Song: Ottoman Lyric Poetry. Seattle: Univ. of Washington.Google Scholar
Andrews, Walter G. 1993. “Singing the Alienated ‘I’: Guattari, Deleuze, and Lyrical Decodings of The Subject in Ottoman Divan Poetry,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 6:2 (Fall), pp. 191-219.Google Scholar
Banarı, Nihad Sami. 1971-76 (1948). Resimli Türk Edebiyati Tarihi. 2 vols. İstanbul: Milli Eğitim.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi K., ed. 1990. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bradbury, Malcolm, & McFarlane, James. 1976. Modernism. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Browne, E.G. 1984 (1893). A Year Amongst the Persians. New York: Hippocrene.Google Scholar
Eagleton, Terry. 1983. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota.Google Scholar
Eagleton, Terry. 1990. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Evin, Ahmet Ö. 1983. Origins and Development of the Modern Turkish Novel. Minneapolis: Bibliotheca.Google Scholar
Gibb, E.J.W. 1900-1907. A History of Ottoman Poetry. 6 vols. London: Luzac.Google Scholar
Göle, Nilüfer. 1991 (1993). Modern Mahrem. İstanbul: Metis.Google Scholar
Gürbilek, Nurdan. 1992. Vitrinde Yaşamak. İstanbul: Metis.Google Scholar
Hillman, Michael Criag. 1987. Review of “Poetry's Voice, Society's Song: Ottoman Lyric Poetry by Walter G. Andrews.” International Journal of Turkish Studies 4:1 (Summer), pp.148.Google Scholar
Holbrook, Victoria Rowe. 1994. The Unreadable Shores of Love: Turkish Modernity and Mystic Romance. Austin: Univ. of Texas.Google Scholar
İnal, İbnülemin Mahmut Kemal. 1988 (1930-42). Son Asir Türk Şairleri. 3 vols. İstanbul: Dergâh.Google Scholar
İnsel, Ahmet, & Cengiz, Aktar. 1985-87. “'Devletin Bekasi’ İçin Yürütülen Çağdaşlaşma Sürecinin Toplumsal Sorunlarι,” Toplum ve Bilim 31/39, pp.21-44.Google Scholar
Jusdanis, Gregory. 1991. Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota.Google Scholar
Katartzis, Dimitrios. 1970. Ta Evriskomena. Athens: Ermis.Google Scholar
Kedourie, Elie. 1987. England and the Middle East: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire 1914-1921. London: Mansell.Google Scholar
Levend, Agâh Sιrrι. 1973. Türk Edebiyati Tarihi. Ankara: Türk Tarih Kunímu.Google Scholar
Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi. 1985 (1949). 19uncu Asir Türk Edebiyat Tarihi. İstanbul: Çağlayan.Google Scholar
Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi. 1969. Edebiyat Üzerine Makaleler. Istanbul: Milli Eğitim.Google Scholar
Türk Dili ve Edebiyati Ansiklopedisi. 1977-90. 7 vols, to date. İstanbul: Dergâh.Google Scholar