Dear Colleagues and Students,
On Wednesday, November 15, Özen Nergis Dolcerocca from Koç University will give the following talk, as part of the Center for Turkish Literature Speaker Series.
Reading Tanpınar Today, Beyond World Literature
Özen Nergis Dolcerocca is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Koç University, Istanbul. She received her doctoral degree in Comparative Literature from New York University. Her research interests include comparative modernisms; 19th- and 20th-century Turkish and French literatures and philosophy of time. Her work appeared in Modern Language Notes and the Journal of Middle Eastern Literatures.
The talk will be in English and take place in A-130 at 16:40.
Refreshments will be available.
Abstract:
In view of increasing national and international interest in A.H. Tanpınar, there is a need for criticism that complicate and complete our understanding of the Turkish modernist, whose work has recently been incorporated into the European universal library. While translations in English bring wider audience, international discovery and dissemination of literary works by a non-Western author typically result in their appropriation by and for the world literary public. In Tanpınar’s case, his work has come to represent and express a presumed essence of Turkish literature and culture of the first half of the twentieth century, “combining a European literary voice with the Ottoman sensibilities of the Near East.” Tanpınar is perceived as the cultural bridge between East and West; tradition and modernity; the Ottoman past and the Republic’s present–all crystallized in the image of Istanbul’s Bosporus, the strait that separates Europe from Asia. In view of Tanpınar as the next Turkish author of world literature (after Pamuk), and of his work as a national cultural product of exportation, the talk will contextualize such local and global appropriations. It will critically examine claims of authentic indigenous literary categories and international standards of readability and argues for a new Tanpınar scholarship which, in its variety and originality, aspire to create an attentive and continuing dialogue that suggests a healthy future for Tanpınar studies.