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12
location in the labyrinthine streets of an Italian town in his article ―The Uncanny,‖ is transformed into a comforting paradigm in the detective fiction. Moreover, the anxieties surrounding the impossibility of originality about writing on Constantinople, which lead to self-estrangement, are effectively addressed when the European-centered cartography of detective fiction reclaims authority and takes up from the point of the ‗dead end‘ or ‗nonexistence‘ associated with Istanbul in modern travelers‘ accounts. It is at the moment when the uncanny is deliberately used as an instrument, to make the familiar strange by locating it elsewhere, that modern nostalgia emerges as a desire to re-inhabit the threshold between the familiar and unfamiliar, the modern and the pre-modern, that appeared unexpectedly in nineteenth-century Constantinople. The peculiar characterization of the local detective in Istanbul as an ambiguous figure on the threshold, in between tradition and modernity, allows for the association of the figure with the distinguishing features of both the flȃneur (i.e. being intuitive) and the detective. The invocation of the flȃneur in the detective and the detective in the flȃneur correlates to the contemporary western detective writers‘ nostalgia for a legible multiethnic community of old Istanbul: the modern crowd is maintained –yet rendered legible through idiosyncratic types of clothing, as if belonging to an archaic world.
While modern western travelers and writers of contemporary detective fiction react to the erasure of Istanbul‘s mythical significance as the legendary Ottoman capital by nostalgically looking for and subsequently restoring the threshold between the pre-modern and the modern, local writers develop and problematize alternative ways of historicizing the city, whose ‗ambiguity‘ as a threshold had once troubled the formation
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 15 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | 12 location in the labyrinthine streets of an Italian town in his article ―The Uncanny,‖ is transformed into a comforting paradigm in the detective fiction. Moreover, the anxieties surrounding the impossibility of originality about writing on Constantinople, which lead to self-estrangement, are effectively addressed when the European-centered cartography of detective fiction reclaims authority and takes up from the point of the ‗dead end‘ or ‗nonexistence‘ associated with Istanbul in modern travelers‘ accounts. It is at the moment when the uncanny is deliberately used as an instrument, to make the familiar strange by locating it elsewhere, that modern nostalgia emerges as a desire to re-inhabit the threshold between the familiar and unfamiliar, the modern and the pre-modern, that appeared unexpectedly in nineteenth-century Constantinople. The peculiar characterization of the local detective in Istanbul as an ambiguous figure on the threshold, in between tradition and modernity, allows for the association of the figure with the distinguishing features of both the flȃneur (i.e. being intuitive) and the detective. The invocation of the flȃneur in the detective and the detective in the flȃneur correlates to the contemporary western detective writers‘ nostalgia for a legible multiethnic community of old Istanbul: the modern crowd is maintained –yet rendered legible through idiosyncratic types of clothing, as if belonging to an archaic world. While modern western travelers and writers of contemporary detective fiction react to the erasure of Istanbul‘s mythical significance as the legendary Ottoman capital by nostalgically looking for and subsequently restoring the threshold between the pre-modern and the modern, local writers develop and problematize alternative ways of historicizing the city, whose ‗ambiguity‘ as a threshold had once troubled the formation |
