Languages of Rupture Final
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Copyright by Matthew Latham Chovanec 2020 The Dissertation Committee for Matthew Latham Chovanec certi6es that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Languages of Rupture: Language Ideology and the Modern Novel in Egypt and Turkey Committee: Kristen Brustad, Co-Supervisor Jeannette Okur, Co-Supervisor Elizabeth Richmond-Garza Emily Drumsta Languages of Rupture: Language Ideology and the Modern Novel in Egypt and Turkey by Matthew Latham Chovanec Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulllment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2020 Acknowledgements I have been so incredibly fortunate to study at the University of Texas at Austin, supported at every turn—through the diUcult moments of faculty changes, existential dilemmas, and global pandemics. Along with oUcial nancial and academic support, my road has been paved by the seless guidance of advisors, the sustaining solidarity of colleagues, and the long-enduring support of my family. I wish to express my deep gratitude to both of my advisors (we should all be so lucky), who have both spent years supporting me with their ideas, their encouragement, and their edits. Professor Brustad has continued to be my advisor from afar for several years, even ying across the world to meet for coZee and talk about Arabic lexicography. She has shown an uncommon amount of commitment to sticking with her students through until the completion of their degrees, and I feel so grateful. Professor Okur’s commitment has been equally enduring, if maintained at a shorter distance. She spent an entire semester reading Tutunamayanlar with me in her oUce, never ceased to amaze me with the care and details she gave to editing my writing , and even let me brew the tea for Çay Saati. She single-handedly maintains an active and engaging Turkish language learning community at UT, and I have been blessed to be part of her community. I would also like to thank Professor Drumsta and Professor Richmond-Garza for being so gracious with their time and being willing to step in last minute to not only serve on my dissertation committee, but to oZer such important and productive insights. Lastly, I want to express my gratitude to those Professors whose courses I feel I am still learning from, including Professor Canbaz, Professor Blyth, and Professor Di-Capua. Although my dissertation hermitage has stretched on for so long that attending classes or interacting with others seems like a distant memory, I am still grateful for my amazing colleagues. for their intellectual camaraderie, al-Jil al-Jadid اabiب اfghب abc eب ا_^دب I would like to thank for keeping the spirit of Arabic as One Language alive, and my far-ung Turkish literature friends and especially Kenan Sharpe, who has become a wonderful friend, editor, and comrade, even though we’ve never lived in the same place. Lastly, and most importantly, I’d like to thank my wife, Nora Chovanec, for making absolutely all of this possible. Not only was she willing to pick up and move to Texas for a man, despite the incredulity of anyone who’s ever known her, but she did so in order to let him sit around and think about literature while she supported him nancially. A truer leap of faith for a dedicated feminist may not exist. Our partnership during the last six years has been built on all kinds of unpaid labor. There is mine which, due to the strange accounting practices of the modern university, was hard to know whether to classify as that of the student employee and the funded scholar. Then there was her emotional labor, which was vital to maintaining our relationships our community, our families, and to each other. And nally there was all of the routine and inexhaustible reproductive labor, from nursing injured chickens to washing dirty dishes, which we did together. Languages of Rupture: Languages of Rupture: Language Ideology and the Modern Novel in Egypt and Turkey by Matthew Latham Chovanec, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2020 CO-SUPERVISOR: Kristen Brustad CO-SUPERVISOR: Jeannette Okur In arguing for the central role of language in the creation of the modern nationalist imaginary, scholars of recent literary histories of both Egypt and Turkey have focused a great deal of energy on commonly accepted narratives of linguistic dysfunction. In Egypt and other Arabic speaking countries, the “diglossia problem” has been the locus for conversations about monologic subjectivity, colonial violence, and the counter-hegemonic politics of language. In Turkey, the language reforms are said to have created a mix of cultural aphasia and historical amnesia, brought on in particular by self-inicted lexical impoverishment. In these accounts, both popular and scholarly, the epistemic ruptures of modernity are embedded in language itself. However, from the perspective of linguistics, both of these apparent dysfunctions are ideological projections, having little to do with either language’s actual communicative functions and everything to do with the social meaning of variation, in a word indexicality. Taking seriously the insights of indexicality, this dissertation argues for a diZerent account of the relationship between language, ideology, and literature. Such an account aims not only to expose the whoran underpinnings of many previous literary histories, but to recast literature’s relationship to national language as one not of coercion and resistance, but one in which literature itself bene6ts narratologically from the forms that standard language ideology provides. Introduction: Languages of Rupture 1 The Whorfian Teleologies of Egyptian and Turkish Literary History 8 Indexicality and Standard Language Ideology 13 A Metalinguistic Strategic Formalism 22 Outline of Chapters 28 Chapter One: Tyranny of the Serious: Typifiable Voices, Irony, and Historical Whorfianism 34 The Maqāmāt as Social and Linguistic History 41 The Epistemic Violence of the Nahḍah 47 Enregisterment 53 Al-Maqāmāt al-Aswāniyyah 58 The Urge to Categorize and Malīm al-Akbar 93 Conclusion 101 Chapter Two: The Philosophical Waiter: Cultural Aphasia and the Petit-Bourgeois Narcissist 103 Introduction 103 The Turkish Language Problem 110 Emotions and Words 120 Psychoanalyzing Turkish Literature 125 Emotions and Stancetaking 132 The Petit-Bourgeois Narcissist 136 İçimizdeki Şeytan and Emotional Intelligence 140 Aylak Adam and the Crowd of Strangers 157 Bir Gün Tek Başına and Class Politics at the Table 173 Conclusion 189 Chapter Three: Village Voices: Indexicality and Non-standardized Dialogue in the Socialist Realist Novel 191 Introduction 191 The National Imaginary and the Village Novel in Egypt and Turkey 198 Standard Language Ideology and Indexicality 208 Socialist Realism and Village Novels 212 Realism, Language Ideology, and the Boundaries of Irony 223 Yūsuf Idrīs 226 al-Ḥarām 235 Orhan Kemal 251 Beeketli Topraklar Üzerinde 258 Conclusion 279 Chapter Four: Speculative Lexicons: Lexicography and History in Gamāl al- Ghīṭānī and Yaşar Kemal 282 Introduction 282 The Politics of Lexicon in Turkey 288 Demirci Çarşısı Cinayeti 294 The Politics of Lexicon in Egypt 325 Khiṭaṭ al-Ghīṭānī 330 Conclusion 359 Chapter Five: Strange Women: we-narratives and other imagined communities 362 National allegory 367 Fludernick’s Poetics of the Collective in Narrative 373 Leylâ Erbil 378 Laṭīfah al-Zayyāt 410 Conclusion 434 Conclusion 436 Works Cited 439 Note on Transliteration and Translation For transliterations from Arabic, I have followed the Journal of Arabic Literature’s modi6ed version of the IJMES system. For all but the most commonly recognizable Arabic words, I use full diacritics, including for the names of Arabic authors who are known in English (e.g. I use Najīb Maḥfūẓ rather than Naguib Mahfouz). The one main exception is my use of Nasser for Gamāl ʿAbd al-Nāṣr, whose English name (as well as the term Nasserism) is used so frequently in historiography I reference that it would be cumbersome to change. I render inseparable prepositions and conjunctions preceding the de6nite article with hyphens to indicate elision, rather than retaining the “a” (e.g. al-siḥḥah wa-l-salāmah). To avoid confusion, I use the Arabic and Turkish titles of books when referencing them, even when English translations exist. That being said, I maintain the spellings chosen by translators for character and place names from Arabic (i.e. Fikri Afendi). Throughout the dissertation, I have placed textual examples from the works of ction I study within tables, with the original language above and the English translation below. Unless a speci6c translator is mentioned upon rst mention of a text, all Arabic and Turkish translations are mine. In other instances, I have translated interviews or essays by the authors in question and given the original text in the footnote. For other scholarly works or journal and newspapers quotes which I have used, I have given the translation without the original as the linguistic speci6cs of the original text are not the focus. Introduction: Languages of Rupture Looking back on the legacy of Arabic literary modernity, the Egyptian author and scholar Radwa Ashour asks in her book al-Hadāthah al-Mumkinah (A Possible Modernity, 2009) why the incredibly innovative and linguistically daring 19th century writer Ahmed al-Shidyāq was overlooked for most of the 20th. As the author of one of the most experimentally modernist (some say even postmodern) work of Arabic literature,