Vol. 123, no 1 (janvier 2008)
Patricia Yaeger
Editor's Column: My Name Is Blue—a Map of Ottoman Baghdad
Cluster on Turkey
Hülya Adak
Introduction: Exiles at Home—Questions for Turkish and Global Literary Studies
Jale Parla
The Wounded Tongue: Turkey's Language Reform and the Canonicity of the Novel
With little Ottoman and less French, the tragicomic hero of an early Turkish novel, Araba Sevdası (1896; “The Carriage Affair”), finds himself at a semantic impasse before a line in a French poem that reads, “[K]elime şeyi resmetmeye borçlu ise” (“[I]f the word could represent the thing”). Frustrated, he throws the poem away, grumbling, “[T]ous les poètes sont fous” (“[A]ll poets are fools”). This defiant gesture marks the beginning of the linguistic issue the Turkish novelists confronted during the first century of the Turkish novel (1870–1970). The reformist objective of these novelists was the employment of a vernacular style to appeal to the readership of an emerging print culture. The subsequent nationalist attempts to simplify the Turkish language led, in Geoffrey Lewis's words, to the “catastrophic success” of the “language revolution” of the republican era and had dire consequences for the development of the novel in Turkey. (JP)
Nergis Ertürk
Modernity and Its Fallen Languages: Tanpınar's Hasret, Benjamin's Melancholy
A comparative study of the politics and theory of language in the writings of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar and Walter Benjamin, this article suggests that a rethinking of the discursive commensurability and incommensurability of modern Turkish language and literature with western European representational practices has crucial implications for critical comparative methodology today. I leave behind conventional accounts based on models of European literary influence, emphasizing instead changes in writing practices that accompanied the development of modern literature and comparatism. Of particular significance for my analysis are the intensification of print culture and language reforms. I examine Tanpınar's writings as a special archive registering the problematic of representational writing, while exploring their continuities and discontinuities with Benjamin's work. I configure an alternative critical comparative framework, troubling the uneven epistemological categories of modernity through which “East” and “West” continue to structure even the transnationalist critical discourse that interrogates them. (NE)
Ian Almond
Terrible Turks, Bedouin Poets, and Prussian Prophets: The Shifting Place of Islam in Herder's Thought
In an examination of the varied responses to the Muslim Orient by the eighteenth-century German thinker Johann Gottfried von Herder, I try to locate the multiple identities he displayed in his treatment of Turks, the Koran, Arab thought, and the doctrines of Islam. What emerges is a series of different voices, employing different registers of language: a Christian response to Islam as a rival revelation-based monotheism (but, at the same time, a more sympathetic Protestant privileging of “Muhammadanism” as a belief system preferable to “papism”); a poetic register, in which “Muhammadans” move from spiritual ignorance to a status of aesthetic desirability; a philological response to the Muslim Orient, one whose emphasis on the Middle Eastern origins of European literature would assist Herder's project of the reprovincialization of Europe; and a nationalist vocabulary, one that would see the rise of Islam as a model for the emergence of Herder's German nation but that would also, paradoxically, express a Turcophobia that demonizes the Ottomans into the other of civilization. (IA)
Jacob Emery
Kinship and Figure in Andrey Bely's Petersburg
Andrey Bely's novel Petersburg (one of the high points of Russian literary modernism and a rough analogue to James Joyce's Ulysses) repeatedly claims that parent and child, being of the same flesh and blood, share an ambivalent identity. At the same time, because the novel opens by invoking a major character's genealogical relation to Adam, the book implies that this kin identity is universal and can be applied to the entire human race. This essay analyzes the role of kinship metaphor in Petersburg, demonstrating that tropes of parent-child identity facilitate the novel's dizzying metaphoric conflation, that they form a kind of metafictional mirror in which the novel probes its own nature as a work of the imagination, and that Bely's theory and practice of metaphor touch on broader philosophical issues of figure and fictionality. (JE)
Melissa Ianetta
“She Must Be a Rare One”: Aspasia, Corinne, and the Improvisatrice Tradition
Improvisation was long the apex of the arts of eloquence, yet modern scholars ignore its importance as a rhetorical and literary genre, thereby severing a long-enduring connection between rhetorical and literary history. This essay reads Plato's Menexenus to formulate a theory of improvisational rhetoric around the cultural position of Aspasia, a foreign woman renowned for eloquence in Periclean Athens. It then places this construction of improvisation alongside Germaine de Staël's early-nineteenth-century novel Corinne to demonstrate the endurance and evolution of improvisational rhetoric. Doing so not only illustrates the long-standing—and long-neglected—influence of improvisation on both rhetorical theory and literary production but also challenges present-day disciplinary prejudice by revealing the permeable boundary between imaginative works and those that provide rhetorical instruction. (MI)
Todd Kontje
Thomas Mann's Wälsungenblut: The Married Artist and the “Jewish Question”
This essay examines Thomas Mann's response to the “Jewish question” by focusing on a phase when he struggled to come to terms in his art with the repression of his homosexual desires and with his marriage to the daughter of assimilated Jews. Mann's attitude toward the Jews is primarily hostile in the controversial novella Wälsungenblut (The Blood of the Walsungs), in which he projects anti-Semitic stereotypes onto distorted images of his wife and new in-laws. In the novel Königliche Hoheit (Royal Highness), Mann produces a more sympathetic portrait of his wife by giving her an ethnic background closely resembling his mother's. Mann's response to the Jewish question is linked to his tendency to think in racial categories; his ambivalence toward the Jews stems from his ambivalence toward himself as an artist with repressed homosexual desires and an admixture of foreign “blood.” (TK)
Karen Leick
Popular Modernism: Little Magazines and the American Daily Press
This essay looks at the American popular reception of modernist little magazines and of writers who were regularly published there, including James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. In the 1920s, book reviewers, syndicated daily book columnists who reached millions, and celebrity columnists took notice of authors or books that were considered news. Experimental modernist writing was frequently discussed, even when it had appeared in obscure little magazines. Even editorials in major newspapers debated literary trends. This national conversation about modernist writing has been largely ignored by critics, although it dramatically affected the canonization of writers in this period. Examining the popular understanding of modernism rather than the ways modernists understood popular culture reveals that there was an intimate exchange between literary modernism and mainstream culture and that modernist writers and texts were better known and, indeed, more popular than has been previously acknowledged. (KL)
Sheila J. Nayar
Écriture Aesthetics: Mapping the Literate Episteme of Visual Narrative
The norms of art-cinema narration—evident in the work of such directors as Ingmar Bergman, Satyajit Ray, and François Truffaut—reflect noetic processes and expectations engendered by a culture of the written word. Such norms are absent from Hindi popular films, which have been historically contoured by the psychodynamics of orally based thought and by devices and motifs common to oral storytelling. By funneling art-cinema narration's norms—already meticulously (and impartially) cataloged by David Bordwell—through the prism of orality and through the orally inflected characteristics of Hindi popular films and by conjointly engaging with literary theory concerned with issues of textuality, this essay develops a novel conceptual matrix for understanding the epistemic pressures that weigh on visual storytelling as both a spectatorial and a generative act. (SJN)
Little-known documents
Maria W. Stewart. Introduction by Eric Gardner
Two Texts on Children and Christian Education
The changing profession
James Phelan
Narratives in Contest; or, Another Twist in the Narrative Turn
Theories and methodologies
Z. Esra Mirze
Implementing Disform: An Interview with Orhan Pamuk
The New Lyric Studies
Virginia Jackson
Who Reads Poetry?
Brent Hayes Edwards
The Specter of Interdisciplinarity
Rei Terada
After the Critique of Lyric
Jonathan Culler
Why Lyric?
Robert Kaufman
Lyric Commodity Critique, Benjamin Adorno Marx, Baudelaire Baudelaire Baudelaire
Oren Izenberg
Poems Out of Our Heads
Stathis Gourgouris
Poiein—Political Infinitive
Yopie Prins
Historical Poetics, Dysprosody, and The Science of English Verse
Forum: Conference Debates
Susan Z. Andrade, Srinivas Aravamudan, Rashmi Bhatnagar, Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, Sangeeta Ray, Ellen Rooney, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Forum
Richard John Ascárate, George Clark, William Kinsley, Donald Lazere, Richard Ohmann, Marjorie Perloff, Jane Reed, Stephen Schryer, James D. Sullivan, and Elizabeth Welt Trahan
Minutes of the MLA Executive Council