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14
The retrospective –rather than conclusive– nature of the last chapter provides the reader with a fresh perspective about the previous chapters on works by western writers.
On a broader level, examination of the coalescence of space with narrative form, with a particular focus on flȃnerie, enables questioning modernity from a spatialized geography. The incorporation of a spatial component into modernity‘s temporal belatedness locates this study in between Eurocentric approaches to modernity (which prioritize the temporal dimension) and alternative modernities theory (that take spatial dimension into consideration). As Timothy Mitchell indicates in the introduction to Questions of Modernity, the history of modernity has always been universal at the expense of excluding the local deviations, and it is the aim of the critics in his edited volume to bring the local and the non-Western to attention with the purpose of proposing a more complicated and heterogeneous version of the modern (xi). The main emphasis in such counter-historical readings is to take into consideration the emergence of the modern outside the West. On the other hand, underlining the significance of the non-Western world for modernity could paradoxically be yet another way to confirm the universality of the modern to which the non-West has also contributed –together with the pioneering West. As Mitchell argues, ―The expanded vision acknowledges the significance of forces and contexts outside the European core. But their significance can be measured only in terms of their contribution to the singular history of the modern‖ (xii). An alternative way to avoid the appropriation of the non-West as a supplementary geography to the development of modernity is to discuss ‗alternative modernities‘ instead of examining the non-West‘s contribution to European modernity. However, as Mitchell demonstrates, this
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 17 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | 14 The retrospective –rather than conclusive– nature of the last chapter provides the reader with a fresh perspective about the previous chapters on works by western writers. On a broader level, examination of the coalescence of space with narrative form, with a particular focus on flȃnerie, enables questioning modernity from a spatialized geography. The incorporation of a spatial component into modernity‘s temporal belatedness locates this study in between Eurocentric approaches to modernity (which prioritize the temporal dimension) and alternative modernities theory (that take spatial dimension into consideration). As Timothy Mitchell indicates in the introduction to Questions of Modernity, the history of modernity has always been universal at the expense of excluding the local deviations, and it is the aim of the critics in his edited volume to bring the local and the non-Western to attention with the purpose of proposing a more complicated and heterogeneous version of the modern (xi). The main emphasis in such counter-historical readings is to take into consideration the emergence of the modern outside the West. On the other hand, underlining the significance of the non-Western world for modernity could paradoxically be yet another way to confirm the universality of the modern to which the non-West has also contributed –together with the pioneering West. As Mitchell argues, ―The expanded vision acknowledges the significance of forces and contexts outside the European core. But their significance can be measured only in terms of their contribution to the singular history of the modern‖ (xii). An alternative way to avoid the appropriation of the non-West as a supplementary geography to the development of modernity is to discuss ‗alternative modernities‘ instead of examining the non-West‘s contribution to European modernity. However, as Mitchell demonstrates, this |
