Donnerstag, 22. Mai 2025, 17:00 - 18:00 iCal

Ringvorlesung Turkologie im Sommersemester 2025

Contemporary trends in the study of modern Turkish literature

March 13th, 2025 - June 12, 2025, 5PM-6:30PM

Institut für Orientalistik, Hörsaal
Spitalgasse 2, Hof 4.1 (Campus Universität Wien), A-1090 Wien

Vortrag

Hybrid

Modernizing Empires: Enlightenment, Nationalist Vanguards and Non-Western Literary Modernities

Özen Nergis Dolcerocca (University of Bologna)

Abstract

Sometime in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, intellectuals in Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East discovered to their great astonishment how "backward" they were compared to Western Europe. As the cultural hegemony of the West grew, they grappled with questions of national self-definition, debating how to revive their past glory and reform their authentic culture to catch up with Western modernity, and how to emulate European literary models and create a native canon. They began to ask similar questions: How do we redefine our literature in relation to Western European forms? Are we backward, and if so, what are we missing? How have we lost our past glory? How can we revive our authentic and traditional culture while reconciling ourselves with Western modernity? These debates then sparked a series of cultural reform projects, including language reform and the systematic translation of European literatures.

This lecture will introduce the "Modernizing Empires" project, a comparative study of cultural reform, linguistic renewal, and literary renaissance movements in three imperial traditions caught between the East-West divide: Russia, Turkey, and Japan. As the first comprehensive and comparative multilingual study of non-Western literary modernities, and the first to bring these specific traditions together, the project challenges Eurocentric models of literary history that interpret these cases as deviations, failures, or late emulations. The lecture will present the project's multi-method research strategy to conduct historical and literary comparisons between these emerging national literary systems, combining qualitative and quantitative methods to map transnational networks of narrative strategies, conceptual systems, and translation practices.

Bio

Özen Nergis Dolcerocca is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Bologna. She is the PI of the ERC project 'Modernizing Empires' (NONWESTLIT), the author of Comparative Modernism and Poetics of Time: Bergson, Tanpinar, Benjamin, Walser (2023), and serves as Associate Editor of the European Review journal sponsored by Academia Europaea.

Zur Webseite der Veranstaltung


Veranstalter

Institut für Orientalistik


Kontakt

Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Yavuz Köse
Department of Near Eastern Studies
+431427743430
yavuz.koese@univie.ac.at