عنوان

Remapping World Literature: Writing the Modern in fin-de-siècle Brazil and Turkey

TL51938

انگلیسی

Remapping World Literature: Writing the Modern in fin-de-siècle Brazil and Turkey

[Thesis]

Yuce, Basak

Moreira, Luiza Franco

State University of New York at Binghamton

2019

217 p.

Ph.D.

State University of New York at Binghamton

2019

Periphery with its subjectivities and particularities is invisible in world literature studies today. Peripheral literatures are seen as homogenized, and the literary works are seen as substitutes for each other. A literary work that has not been translated into the languages of the center cannot enter the world literature canon and be discussed under the umbrella of world literature studies. By using an alternative way of entering world literature as suggested by David Damrosch, I argue that texts can also enter into world literature by bringing the world to the text itself. Thus, I put into dialogue two fin-de-siècle ur-authors from the periphery, Brazilian writer Machado de Assis and Turkish writer Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil, who brought the world to their texts. By using historically informed close reading of three novels from each author, the dissertation demonstrates the similarities and discrepancies between the novels with a specific focus on the portrayal of modernity. It focuses temporally on the fin-de-siècle, a transition period for both countries from empire to republic, a time when their nation and state-building processes were initiated. This dissertation is inspired by and seeks the answers for the following questions: Can we call a literary work as a part of the world literature even though it is not translated into another language? How did the writers in the periphery respond to the experience of modernity, and how did it influence their canonical status in their national literatures? How did the writers of the periphery imagine/define world literature at the turn of the twentieth century? What are the potentials of their approach for our understanding of world literature today? How does this comparison help to understand the periphery's relationship with the center beside the no doubt useful but already loaded notions such as belated modernity, imitation, misplaced ideas, metonymic modernity, multiple modernities? Halid Ziya and Machado, both journalist-translator-authors in the emerging literary fields of their countries, whose works thematize modernity from similar aspects, share equal status in their national canons whereas they don't enjoy equal status in the international canon. My dissertation, looking at the reasons for this difference, analyzes the peripheral works in comparison with French novels which they have been widely cited together in the national scholarships. I problematize the usage of the notion of "influence" to describe the relationship between the novels. Instead, I argue the peripheral counterparts share a homologous reality with the novels from the center. In the first chapter, this dissertation focuses on the emergence of literary and journalistic fields and new commercial journalism as an aspect of modernity. It demonstrates how new journalism was criticized in the works of Machado and Halid Ziya. It problematizes the reading of the two peripheral novels Machado de Assis' Quincas Borba and Halid Ziya's Mai ve Siyah as third world national allegories. The analysis shows how new journalism constituted an anchor to reality for these novels. In the comparison, the two novels are also put in dialogue with Honoré de Balzac's Illusions perdues. In the second chapter, the focus is on the emergence of the new woman in Machado de Assis' Dom Casmurro and Halid Ziya's Aşk-ı Memnu. To understand the discrepancies between the novels, the dissertation analyzes the usage of irony in both works and compared them with Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. It is concluded that although they used different modes of irony the situational aspects of irony in the three writers' works are similar. In the third chapter, the portrayal of the urban experience in Machado de Assis' Counselor Ayres Memorial and Halid Ziya's Nesl-i Ahir which deal with the theme of homecoming/nostos is analyzed. It is argued that the theme of nostos is also related to the modern notion of flânerie as well as the emergence of the nation in both novels. The portrayal of flânerie in these two peripheral novels is compared with Flaubert's L'education sentimentale and it is concluded that although the practice of flânerie varies in the three contexts, the main aspects of this modern notion are similar both in the literature of the periphery and the center.

Comparative literature

Latin American literature

Middle Eastern literature

Yuce, Basak

Moreira, Luiza Franco

State University of New York at Binghamton

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y