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11
providing a generic distinction than to point out a new set of characteristics that are also shared by modern travelogues. Being by definition (self)-analytical, detective fiction incorporates the self-questioning gaze of the travelogue genre. Structurally speaking, detective fiction is the narration of a loss/secret/mystery that is obvious; yet the secret opts to be expressed, repeated, and given a form by the detective figure. As observed in the works of Barbara Nadel and Jason Goodwin, the two authors examined in this chapter, the major idea behind travel is to look for ‗something remote‘ (conceptually or physically, i.e. a long bygone past and a distant land) –a search that results in a return to the obvious and the familiar that was not so obvious at the beginning. One could argue that the investigation conducted in detective stories is, both structurally and thematically, correlated with the modern travelers‘ search.
By inserting the familiar figure of the detective and the experience of detection into a strange context, western detective writers attempt to revive and re-capture that moment of fluctuation between the familiar and the unfamiliar, and replace the unexpected detour of the textual uncanny with the pre-planned, recognizable pattern or template of the detective genre. The main argument in this chapter considers the act of compulsory repetition as a conscious effort to re-locate the familiar, embodied in the detective figure, within the unfamiliar domain of the post-Ottoman capital. This repetition not only revives but also overturns the modern condition that moves from the unfamiliar to the familiar, as argued in the first two chapters. The act of compulsory repetition, which is posited as a disconcerting experience in the travelogues, especially as observed in Freud‘s nightmarish anecdote about unintentionally going back to the same
Object Description
| Title | Collective melancholy: Istanbul at the crossroads of history, space and memory |
| Author | Tekdemir, Hande |
| Author email | tekdemir@usc.edu; hande_tekdemir@yahoo.com |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | English |
| School | College of Letters, Arts and Sciences |
| Date defended/completed | 2008-08-06 |
| Date submitted | 2008 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2008-10-11 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Russett, Margaret |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Lloyd, David Norindr, Panivong |
| Abstract | This study draws on a historical perspective on the evolution of a certain form that I call the "Istanbul canon" in which the city has always been associated with loss. Tracing the genealogy of loss in the literary representations of Istanbul by both western and local writers in the past and the present, I explore how the various configurations of loss are related to the local context and to the history of modernity at large. The city's ambivalent history in this geography on the threshold, functions as a means to understand loss, concealed in the various spatio-temporal layers -- East and West, colonizer and the colonized, pre-modern and modern, -- within the history of modernity. My objective is to consider the cityscape as a template upon which modernity is projected as a subjective and fleeting experience, comprehended in both local and global terms, and critiqued accordingly. I focus on the uncanny as a recurrent characteristic of nineteenth-century travelogues, in which the traveler is unsettled by unexpectedly encountering the familiar within the unfamiliar terrain of Constantinople, while I consider the nostalgic renditions of modern travelogues and western detective fiction not only as reflections on the changes within the western literary canon about the city, but also as reactions against the modernizing world. Finally, the last chapter illustrates melancholy as the dominant sentiment in the contemporary Turkish literature on Istanbul; yet, it also displays the convergence of melancholy with the uncanny and nostalgia in Turkish writers' ambiguous relationship to the modern. |
| Keyword | melancholy; Istanbul; Orhan Pamuk; travel literature; detective fiction |
| Geographic subject (city or populated place) | Istanbul; Constantinople |
| Coverage date | after 1800 |
| Coverage era | Nineteenth Century; Twentieth Century |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m1656 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Rights | Tekdemir, Hande |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Filename | etd-Tekdemir-2357 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume26/etd-Tekdemir-2357.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 14 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | 11 providing a generic distinction than to point out a new set of characteristics that are also shared by modern travelogues. Being by definition (self)-analytical, detective fiction incorporates the self-questioning gaze of the travelogue genre. Structurally speaking, detective fiction is the narration of a loss/secret/mystery that is obvious; yet the secret opts to be expressed, repeated, and given a form by the detective figure. As observed in the works of Barbara Nadel and Jason Goodwin, the two authors examined in this chapter, the major idea behind travel is to look for ‗something remote‘ (conceptually or physically, i.e. a long bygone past and a distant land) –a search that results in a return to the obvious and the familiar that was not so obvious at the beginning. One could argue that the investigation conducted in detective stories is, both structurally and thematically, correlated with the modern travelers‘ search. By inserting the familiar figure of the detective and the experience of detection into a strange context, western detective writers attempt to revive and re-capture that moment of fluctuation between the familiar and the unfamiliar, and replace the unexpected detour of the textual uncanny with the pre-planned, recognizable pattern or template of the detective genre. The main argument in this chapter considers the act of compulsory repetition as a conscious effort to re-locate the familiar, embodied in the detective figure, within the unfamiliar domain of the post-Ottoman capital. This repetition not only revives but also overturns the modern condition that moves from the unfamiliar to the familiar, as argued in the first two chapters. The act of compulsory repetition, which is posited as a disconcerting experience in the travelogues, especially as observed in Freud‘s nightmarish anecdote about unintentionally going back to the same |
