Istanbul 1940 and Global Modernity

The World According to Auerbach, Tanpinar, and Edib

By (author) E. Khayyat

Publication date:

11 December 2018

Length of book:

296 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498585835

Istanbul 1940 and Global Modernity: The World According to Auerbach, Tanpınar, and Edib engages Erich Auerbach’s Istanbul career and his pioneering works of comparative literature in a new light. It interprets Auerbach’s works against the background of his Turkish colleagues’ analogous works that, like Auerbach’s masterpieces, were drafted at Istanbul University in the 1940s. Unlike Auerbach’s writings, which center around Western literary cultures and Christianity, these Turkish writings trace non-Western, largely Islamicate cultural histories. The critic, novelist, and poet Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–1962) and his illustrious senior, the Muslim feminist, humanist, and novelist Halide Edib (1884–1964) focused on Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural trajectories. In addition to offering groundbreaking insights into their respective cultural legacies, Auerbach, Tanpınar, and Edib elaborated extensively on the intercrossing that is their meeting place, the chiasmic space of modern literature. Interpreting their writings as the work of a collective, Istanbul 1940 and Global Modernity examines the new paths these critics opened for theorizing literary modernity, world literature, and the comparative study of literature and religion.

Introduction: Comparativism, Analogy, and World Literature

Part One: How to Turn Turk

Introduction

Chapter One: Auerbach’s Orients

Chapter Two: The Modern Malaise and the Figure

Conclusion

Part Two: The Boat

Introduction

Chapter Three: Islamicate Pasts

Chapter Four: European Turkey and Literary Modernity

Conclusion

Part Three: A Wandering Jewess

Introduction

Chapter Five: Edib’s Spirit

Chapter Six: Turkey, India and the World

Conclusion

Afterword: The Newcomer

Bibliography

About the Author

In this book, which combines well-known figures such as Erich Auerbach and Orhan Pamuk with lesser known ones such as Halide Edib and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, E. Khayyat takes us into the literary world of Istanbul, which gave rise to a new understanding of world literature. This is a book only Khayyat could have written.