Haunted Modernities: Linguistic and Cultural Change in Ottoman Turkey

This dissertation examines processes of translation (in the broad sense) in an earlier moment of global modernization in an avant-garde Ottoman Turkish literary movement, Edebiyat-ı Cedide (“New Literature”). Noted for its experimentation with words and narrative stylistics and for ushering in a new way of representing reality, I argue that Edebiyat-ı Cedide innovation is at once connected to Ottoman and European literary practices, yet at the same time different from them. My theoretical framework draws on theories of interlingual and cultural translation to help me analyze how meanings are invented in, not transferred to, the local environment. Paradigms of European influence, which prevail in the conceptualization of this significant literary movement, neglect to account for the ways in which Edebiyat-ı Cedide authors try to come to terms with the asymmetrical relations of power between global languages. This issue necessarily involves the question of time in language. In particular, how do Edebiyat-ı Cedide authors deal with the specter of the European linguistic other as representing the present and as a reference of superiority and the specter of Arabic and Persian as intimate linguistic others as represented as belonging to the past?The first chapter examines Edebiyat-ı Cedide discourse on language highlighting the ways in which the authors legitimized neologisms and innovative syntax in Edebiyat-ı Cedide fiction. Chapters 2 and 3 shifts the focus from discourse to fiction. Chapter 2 examines the role of the narrator (and the protagonist as the narrator’s double) in cultural translation attending to rhetoric on Ottoman tradition and innovative writing. The third chapter analyzes the employment of translingual vocabulary (in particular, established terms with reinscribed meaning) and narrative devices and how these terms and devices produce interiority in Edebiyat-ı Cedide psychological narratives