Collective melancholy: Istanbul at the crossroads of history, space and memory

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منو

" Collective melancholy: Istanbul at the crossroads of history, space and memory "
Hande Tekdemir M. Russett

Document Type	:	Latin Dissertation
Language of Document	:	English
Record Number	:	55114
Doc. No	:	TL25068
Call number	:	‭3341806‬
Main Entry	:	Hande Tekdemir
Title & Author	:	Collective melancholy: Istanbul at the crossroads of history, space and memory\ Hande Tekdemir
College	:	University of Southern California
Date	:	2008
Degree	:	Ph.D.
student score	:	2008
Page No	:	274
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.
Subject	:	Social sciences; Language, literature and linguistics; Detective fiction; Melancholy; Orientalism; Uncanny; Travel literature; Turkey; Istanbul; Comparative literature; Middle Eastern history; British and Irish literature; 0593:British and Irish literature; 0295:Comparative literature; 0333:Middle Eastern history
Added Entry	:	M. Russett
Added Entry	:	University of Southern California