This talk provides an overview of C. Ceyhun Arslan’s forthcoming book, The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures (https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-ottoman-canon-and-the-construction-of-arabic-and-turkish-literatures.html).
The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures fleshes out the Ottoman canon’s multilingual character to call for a literary history that can reassess and even move beyond categories that many critics take for granted, such as ‘classical Arabic literature’ and ‘Ottoman literature’. It gives a historically contextualised close reading of works from authors who have been studied as pioneers of Arabic and Turkish literatures, such as Ziya Pasha (1829-1880), Jurjī Zaydān (1861-1914), Maʿrūf al-Ruṣāfī (1875-1945) and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-1962). The Ottoman Canon analyses how these authors prepared the arguments and concepts that shape how we study Arabic and Turkish literatures today as they reassessed the relationship among the Ottoman canon’s linguistic traditions. Furthermore, The Ottoman Canon examines the Ottoman reception of pre-Ottoman poets, such as Kaʿb ibn Zuhayr (d. c. 646/647), hence opening up new research avenues for Arabic literature, Ottoman studies and comparative literature. It also discusses how the Ottoman canon perpetuated exclusions in terms of gender, language and religion.
C. Ceyhun Arslan is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Koç University and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow of EUME and Saarland University. His book, The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures, is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press in March 2024. His articles and book chapters have appeared or are forthcoming in journals and edited volumes such as Journal of Mediterranean Studies, Journal of Arabic Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, Middle Eastern Literatures, The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry, and Sea of Literatures: Towards a Theory of Mediterranean Literature.
Toygun Altıntaş is an associated research fellow at EUME. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at EUME and Freie Universitat Berlin. He works on the social and political history of minoritization, supremacism and inequality in the late Ottoman Empire. His publications explore Ottoman strategies of imperial rule, the Ottoman Armenian revolutionary movement and the entangled processes of gendered violence and ethno-confessional marginalization.
