Conférence de Kader Konuk (University of Michigan): East-West Mimesis. Erich Auerbach in Istanbul

CONFERENCE

6 avril 2012, 9h30-12h30

KADER KONUK, University of Michigan

East West Mimesis: Erich Auerbach in Istanbul

Erich Auerbach's exile in Istanbul represents a larger set of historical forces, forces that, on the one hand, expelled him from fascist Germany, and, on the other, functionalized him for a program of cultural renewal in Turkey. For the scholars dismissed from German universities, Turkey provided a haven when tertiary and governmental institutions offered to hire philologists, philosophers, historians, architects, natural scientists, economists, and musicians from 1933 on in order to support the country's modernization reforms. Auerbach joined this cohort in 1936 as the chair of the nation's leading faculty for Western languages and literatures at Istanbul University. His tenure in Istanbul lasted eleven years, during which time Turkey implemented  significant political, cultural, and educational changes.

Kader Konuk will talk about how Auerbach found European culture at home in Istanbul, even while the humanist tradition was being banished from Europe. Paradoxically, Auerbach's own deracination in Europe was to some extent mirrored in his host country, which tried to substitute the Ottoman past for a shared humanist culture. At the very moment when Europe was being systematically destroyed, Auerbach, while in Istanbul, preserved the humanist tradition and investigated the origins of Western European culture in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, a work that transformed the discipline of Comparative Literature in the postwar period.

Kader Konuk is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan.

Trained as a comparatist in German, Turkish, and English literature, her research is situated at the disciplinary nexus between literary criticism, cultural studies, and cultural history. Specifically, she investigates the intersections between the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim worlds, beginning with the Ottoman Westernization reforms of the early eighteenth century, the German-Jewish exile in Turkey during WWII, and continuing on to debates over Turkish migration to Germany. In examining the context for East-West relations (ambassadorial missions, military adventures, travel, migration, and exile), her work analyzes cultural practices like integration, assimilation, and ethnomasquerade.

Kader Konuk received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Paderborn University and has been teaching at the University of Michigan since 2001. Her most recent monograph is entitled East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey  (Stanford UP 2010). She is currently working on an edited volume entitled Kafka in the Middle East and a monograph on the genesis of secular thought in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and Western Europe.