Mavi Boncuk |East West Mimesis
Auerbach in Turkey by KADER KONUK[1]
2010 | 320 PP. | Cloth ISBN: 9780804769747 | Digital ISBN: 9780804775755
Winner of the 2012 GSA-DAAD Book Prize, sponsored by the German Studies Association.
Winner of the 2012 René Wellek Prize, sponsored by the American Comparative Literature Association.
East West Mimesis follows the plight of German-Jewish humanists who escaped Nazi persecution by seeking exile in a Muslim-dominated society. Kader Konuk asks why philologists like Erich Auerbach found humanism at home in Istanbul at the very moment it was banished from Europe. She challenges the notion of exile as synonymous with intellectual isolation and shows the reciprocal effects of German émigrés on Turkey's humanist reform movement. By making literary critical concepts productive for our understanding of Turkish cultural history, the book provides a new approach to the study of East-West relations.
Central to the book is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, written in Istanbul after he fled Germany in 1936. Konuk draws on some of Auerbach's key concepts—figura as a way of conceptualizing history and mimesis as a means of representing reality—to show how Istanbul shaped Mimesis and to understand Turkey's humanist reform movement as a type of cultural mimesis.
Doğu Batı Mimesis, 2013 | Metis Yayınları | Kader Konuk
Almanya'da doğan Konuk, Köln Üniversitesi İngiliz Edebiyatı bölümünü bitirdi. Hull Üniversitesi Kadın ve Edebiyat Bölümü'nde yüksek lisansını tamamladı ve 1999 yılında Paderborn Üniversitesi'nden doktora derecesini aldı. Alman, Türk ve İngiliz edebiyatları arasındaki ilişkileri irdelemeye yönelik bir eğitim görmüş olan Konuk, edebiyat eleştirisi, kültürel araştırmalar ve kültür tarihi arasındaki disipliner bağlantılara odaklanıyor. 18. yüzyıl Osmanlı Batılılaşma reformlarından 21. yüzyılda Türkiye-Almanya ilişkilerine uzanan bir tarihsel çerçevede, Yahudi, Hıristiyan ve Müslüman toplulukların kesişimlerini ele alıyor, Doğu-Batı ilişkilerinin tarihsel bağlamlarını (elçilik, seyahat, göç ve sürgün) inceliyor ve entegrasyon, asimilasyon ve etnomaskeleme gibi kültürel pratikleri araştırıyor. Kader Konuk doçent doktor olarak halen Michigan Üniversitesi'nde Karşılaştırmalı Edebiyat ve Alman Araştırmaları bölümlerinde çalışmalarını sürdürmektedir.
Konuk'un Türkçedeki ilk kitabı olan Doğu Batı Mimesis aynı zamanda German Studies Association'ın En İyi Germanistik ve Kültürel Araştırmalar Kitabı Ödülü'nü (2012) ve American Comparative Literature Association'ın en iyi karşılaştırmalı edebiyat kitabına verdiği René Wellek Ödülü'nü (2013) almıştır.
Erich Auerbach and the Humanist Reform to the Turkish Education System
Kader Konuk
From: Comparative Literature Studies
Volume 45, Number 1, 2008
pp. 74-89 | 10.1353/cls.0.0014
Brief excerpt of the content:
With its predominantly Muslim citizenry and geographical location linking two continents, Turkey has become a battleground for the definition of "Europeanness." Parallel to the debate over whether Turkey can legitimately represent Europe and so join the European Union runs the debate over how to preserve "Turkishness" in a time of change. In fact, these debates are not new. The anxiety about losing a sense of national difference while conforming to European culture—however defined—is rooted in the early years of the Turkish Republic when European concepts of modernity were adopted to serve the country's domestic purposes and international aspirations. With the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk introduced a series of modernization reforms designed to break with the Ottoman past. This article focuses on a highly significant aspect of those Europeanization reforms, namely the restructuring of the humanities, something that was to play a central role in the dissemination of European ideas and the reconceptualization of Turkish citizens as Europeans. Modeling itself on the European system, Istanbul University was refounded as a modern institution of higher learning in 1933, an event coinciding with the dismissal of German academics on anti-Semitic and political grounds from German universities. Taking advantage of the flight from National Socialism, Turkish universities immediately hired more than forty German scholars to facilitate the westernization of tertiary institutions. These modernization measures, steered by both Turkish reformers and German émigrés, promoted identification with Europe while simultaneously emphasizing Turkishness as a common ground for the new nation. This article investigates the role of German emigrants as ambivalent mediators within Turkey's modernization process. Because of his pivotal role in the humanities in Germany, Turkey, and the United States, this article focuses on the Romance scholar Erich Auerbach (1892–1957) and the eleven years he spent in Turkey. Investigating Auerbach's role in Turkey allows me to show how the national and the humanist movement were intertwined at this crucial juncture in Turkey's identification with the West. Erich Auerbach was hired to chair the Faculty for Western Languages and Literatures at Istanbul University and produced his most significant scholarship during his tenure in Turkey (1936–1947). As one of the greatest humanist critics of his time, Auerbach gained prominence with the publication of his seminal work, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature in 1946. This achievement paved the way for his career at Pennsylvania State University, then Princeton University, and finally Yale University. Included among his methodological contributions was a new approach for studying the representation of reality through narrative style, an approach that greatly influenced a range of fields, including literary theory, history, comparative literature, and cultural history.
Edward Said suggested that for Auerbach the "Orient and Islam stood for the ultimate alienation from and opposition to Europe, the European tradition of Christian Latinity, as well as to the putative authority of ecclesia, humanistic learning, and cultural community."1Pace Said, I show that the concept of modernity in 1930s Turkey was based on European learning—specifically on the humanistic tradition. This is not, of course, to downplay the significance of the Orientalist stereotyping of Turkey in the Western European imagination. I want to emphasize, however, that Turkish experiences informed Auerbach's view of Istanbul in more complex and powerful ways than discourses that set up a dichotomy between the Orient and Occident. I suggest that Said's reading of Auerbach as an isolated, dislocated, and estranged European intellectual in an Oriental world serves Said's own rhetorical purposes as an intellectual in exile; what it overlooks is the fact that Istanbul University in the 1930s was, for good reason, dubbed "Berlin dis , inda en büyük Alman Üniversitesi" [the biggest German university besides Berlin].2
Istanbul was not only a city in which Auerbach met many other German scholars who fled National Socialism; it was also a place with a familiar history. For Auerbach personally, Istanbul was linked to the classical heritage of Western Europe, something that allowed him to identify with the city. This is clear from a letter dating from 1938, in which Auerbach wrote, "Es ist Istanbul im Grunde noch immer eine...
Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European Encounters:
Reenacting Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Kader Konuk
From: Criticism
Volume 46, Number 3, Summer 2004
pp. 393-414 | 10.1353/crt.2005.0007
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Criticism 46.3 (2004) 393-414
Reenacting Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Kader Konuk
University of Michigan
The year 1718 marks a significant point in the history of the Ottoman Empire, demarcating the first spate of Westernization reforms—the so-called Tulip Period (1718–1730)—which sought to strengthen the Ottoman Empire after its defeat in Vienna at the end of the seventeenth century. In 1718, Ottoman-European encounters were cast in a new light from a European woman's point of view: this was the year Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her husband, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, resided in Istanbul.
Montagu's journey constitutes the beginning of women's secular travel accounts about the Orient. Largely excluding any political commentary about Ottoman-European relations in her letters from Edirne (Adrianople) and Istanbul, Montagu immersed herself in the segregated world and everyday culture of Ottoman women. For the first time in Western travel writing about the Orient, exclusively female spaces became subject to the gaze of a European traveler. Montagu gained entrance not only to the courtly harem but also to the women's bath. In her Turkish Embassy Letters, published posthumously in 1763, she claimed that by learning Arabic she was able to form friendships with Turkish women and could now "boast of being the first foreigner ever to have had that pleasure." Along with her interest in Arabic, Mary Wortley Montagu developed a passion for Ottoman clothing. She wrote extensively about the beauty and advantages of veiling and wearing Ottoman dress, and she engaged in the practice known as ethnomasquerade.
This article deals with the question of ethnomasquerade in women's travel accounts, highlighting key moments in Ottoman-European encounters over the course of three centuries. Ethnomasquerade is defined here as the performance of an ethnic identity through the mimicking of clothes, gestures, appearance, language, cultural codes, or other components of identity formation. It is a phenomenon that can be observed in colonial as well as noncolonial contexts, providing useful insights into the workings of hegemonic discourses. Edward Said, Marjorie Garber, and Kaja Silverman have dealt extensively with ethnomasquerading travelers, such as Richard Burton and T. E. Lawrence. Garber, for example, in her study of Western ethnomasquerading cross-dressers in the Orient, proposes that ethnomasquerade operates as a subversive form of mimicry.
In this study, I suggest that it is misleading to ask whether ethnomasquerade is subversive per se. Instead, I am interested in the historically specific ways in which ethnomasquerade operates as a literary strategy in travel writing. Thus, my question concerns the extent to which ethnomasquerade is indicative of changing attitudes vis-à-vis the Other in Ottoman-European encounters. Whereas scholars have engaged with ethnomasquerading European women and the question of gender, ethnomasquerading Ottoman travelers to the West have attracted little attention. The study of Ottomans dressing in Western clothes, however, promises insights into the formation of subject positions in the history of Ottoman-European encounters and raises key questions about the function of ethnomasquerade itself. Hence, I explore the performative function of dress in Ottoman-European encounters from both sides—European and Ottoman—and focus on Istanbul as the site of arrival and departure for four travelers: the British Mary Wortley Montagu, Julia Sophia Pardoe, and Grace Ellison, and the Ottoman Zeyneb Hanım.
European Women Traveling to the Ottoman Empire
According to her letters, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu dressed in Ottoman attire for a number of reasons: to satisfy her curiosity, to claim authenticity through close experience, to travel incognito by passing as an Ottoman woman, and to serve as a corrective to men's travel writing on the Orient. Montagu clearly enjoyed the aesthetic pleasure of ethnomasquerade and even had herself painted in Turkish dress. Montagu's masquerade, however, is not a stage in the process of cultural conversion. I suggest that Montagu's example shows no more than a short-lived fantasy of embodying the Other and serves as a narrative strategy in her letters. Her identification with elite Ottoman women serves the purpose of asserting her own aristocratic background and emphasizing her eccentricity. Her masquerade also keeps her Englishness intact, a fact that becomes evident in the...
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