The Trans-Communal Rise of the Novel in the Late Ottoman Empire
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“We Must Ourselves Write About Ourselves”: The Trans-Communal Rise of the Novel in the Late Ottoman Empire by Etienne E. Charriere A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Comparative Literature) in the University of Michigan 2016 Doctoral Committee : Professor Vassilis Lambropoulos, Chair Professor Kevork B. Bardakjian Professor Michele A. Hannoosh Professor Kader Konuk, Universität Duisburg-Essen © Etienne Eugene Charriere 2016 Εις µνήµην Μιχάλη Λασιθιωτάκη (1955-2012) ii Acknowledgements Long before this project received its definitive title and acquired its current form, a few individuals provided, in one way or another, a crucial impetus for me to begin thinking about the questions that are addressed here, and they must be recognized first. Thank you to Michel Lassithiotakis, who oversaw the writing of an early work, some elements of which found their way into the present one. During all the stages of this project, I often recalled fondly his warm support and kind words of encouragements. I am deeply saddened that he will not be able to read this dissertation, which I dedicate to him. Thank you to Valentina Calzolari for her unflinching enthusiasm in teaching a "small" language: I have never regretted that I once entered an Armenian classroom almost entirely by accident, and immediately found myself at home. And I will never be able to thank Katerina Fameliadou enough for speaking Greek to a very young Swiss child years and years ago –she probably did not know, at the time, what long-term consequences those few words would have. At the University of Michigan, I found an intellectual home like no other, and I remain convinced that there was no other place in the world where I could have completed a project like the present one. I am forever indebted to Vassilis Lambropoulos for providing invaluable support over the past seven years, and for never failing to give me the simplest, yet most crucial thing that a mentor could give: trust. I also want to acknowledge him, and Artemis Leontis, for the extraordinary work that they keep accomplishing, in making the Modern Greek Program at the University of Michigan a truly exceptional home for innovative projects in the field. To the other iii members of my committee, Kevork Bardakjian, Michele Hannoosh, and Kader Konuk, my deepest gratitude for their teaching, their support, their mentoring, the warmth with which they welcomed and guided this project, and for inspiring me in so many different ways. I also want to thank a few other faculty members at the University of Michigan who contributed invaluable insights, or simply much-needed encouragements: thank you to Kristin Dickinson, Devi Mays, and Frieda Ekotto. I wish to express my gratitude to the two most recent chairs of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Yopie Prins and Silke Weineck, for their support, and for turning this department into such a spirited community. And many thanks to the department staff, Nancy Harris, Paula Frank, and Judy Gray, for making me feel at home from the very first day. I also want to warmly thank the Armenian Studies Program, its two successive directors, Gerard Libaridian and Kathryn Babayan, and its administrator Naira Tumanyan for their support and assistance, and for sustaining such a rich and vibrant community of scholars. The writing of this dissertation would not have been possible without the very generous support of the Manoogian Simone Foundation, and the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan through the Constantine A. Tsangadas Trust, and I am extremely grateful to both. I would also like to thank all the fellow graduate students who have made the most important contribution of all to this project, that of friendship: my cohort, Emily Goedde, Olga Greco, Sara Hakeem-Grewal, Cassie Miura-Erickson, and Hilary Levinson; Başak Çandar, Gen Creedon, Nate Gallant, Mélissa Gélinas, Tuğçe Kayaal, Harry Kashdan, Adrienne Jacaruso, Chris Mead, Will Stroebel, Shannon Winston, Yael Kenan and, in particular, Neveser Köker and Duygu Ula for talks, coffee, and memorable interstate bus rides. iv More than halfway through this project, I had the rare privilege of meeting, in the person of Ali Bolcakan, not only someone whose interests, academic and otherwise, intersect with mine in a multitude of ways, but also -and more importantly- the most excellent of friends. Many thanks to him for helping me finish this dissertation in more ways than he probably realizes. Finally, I want to express my immense gratitude to my family, the ones that are still here and the ones that are gone. To my parents, for giving me the most precious gifts of all: relentless curiosity. To my sister and brother, for sharing this gift with me. And, bien sûr, all the gratitude in the world to Justin for making the ocean truly worth crossing, again and again -and for not hesitating one minute before accepting to cross it with me. v Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii List of Figures viii Abstract ix Introduction 1 1. Conceptualizing Transnational Literary Exchanges 6 2. Naming and Classifying: Taxonomies of Global Literature 17 3. From Deleuze to Bourdieu: Literature vs. Literary Field 25 4. The Novel in Narrow Literary Fields 31 5. Learning from Istanbul: The Novel in Trans-Communal Literary Fields 33 Chapter 1. Trans-Aegean Trajectories: Locating the Emergence of the Modern Greek Novel 47 1. Explaining the Rise of the Novel: Ian Watt's Legacy 48 2. Rediscovering a Corpus: The Novel in Post-Revolutionary Greece 53 3. Rethinking the Rise of the Modern Greek Novel: Toward a Trans-Aegean Model 60 4. Representing Aegean Crossings 73 Chapter 2. Translating the Novel: The Wandering Jew in Istanbul 77 1. Nineteenth-century Reading Practices: A Context for Translation Trends 83 2. Translation as Critical Reading: The Wandering Jew and the Greek-Ottoman Praxis of Translation 124 Chapter 3. Armenian Ivanhoes, Greek Rob Roys: Historical Fiction and the Nationalization of the Novel 164 1. Beyond Walter Scott: The Historical Novel in Romantic Europe 165 2. Historical Fiction in Greece and Armenia 177 vi Chapter 4. The Novel as Commodity: Virginie and Her Ottoman Sisters 204 1. The Novel as Object: Virginie's Visit to Eliza's Boudoir 210 2. The Νovel from Βook to Chapbook: Alexandre Ben-Guiat's Pablo y Virginia (1905) 225 3. Toward the End of the (Western) Novel: Zafirakis Hypandrevmenos' Zenobia (1872) 235 Conclusion 251 Bibliography 257 vii List of Figures Fig. 1 Novels translated into Greek and published in the Ottoman Empire 90 Fig. 2 Comparative table of the first translations of important French novels into Greek, Armenian, Ottoman-Turkish (in the Arabic, Armenian, and Greek scripts), and Ladino 99 Fig. 3a Le Juif errant: 1846 and 1861 versions (1) 131 Fig. 3b Le Juif errant: 1846 and 1861 versions (2) 132 Fig. 4a Le Juif errant: 1846 and 1861 versions (3) 142 Fig. 4b Le Juif errant: 1846 and 1861 versions (4) 143 Fig. 5a Le Juif errant: 1846 and 1861 versions (5) 146 Fig. 5b Le Juif errant: 1846 and 1861 versions (6) 147 Fig. 6a Le Juif errant: 1846 and 1861 versions (7) 148 Fig. 6b Le Juif errant: 1846 and 1861 versions (8) 149 Fig. 7 "The Death of Virginie" 214 Fig. 8 "Shipwreck off the coast of the Isle of France" 215 Fig. 9 "Histoire de Paul et Virginie" 216 Fig. 10 Unidentified lithograph 217 Fig. 11 "Paul's Death" 218 viii Abstract Studying texts written in some of the main literary idioms of the late Ottoman Empire (primarily Greek and Armenian, as well as Ottoman-Turkish and Ladino) and examining cultural practices carried out by the corresponding ethno-linguistic groups, this dissertation surveys, across community boundaries, the development of a culture of the novel in Istanbul and Izmir during the long nineteenth century. Placing a special emphasis on the appropriation by Ottoman literati of cultural tropes elaborated in Western Europe, this project studies both the spread of the foreign novel in the Ottoman Empire and the rise of domestic fiction within a trans-communal framework. Highlighting the ways in which the hegemony of Western European fiction was at once affirmed and challenged in the Empire, the project lays the ground for a renewed understanding of the rise of the novel outside of the West. The introduction of this work offers a survey of the various models that have been proposed, in comparative literary studies, to account for the unequal nature of exchanges across the global literary field. Additionally, it proposes to reformulate the concept of "minor literature" by shifting the focus to notions of amplitude and constriction, and by introducing the notion of narrow literary field as an alternative model to account for the structure of unequal exchanges that permeate the global literary realm. ix In an effort to analyze the conditions that allowed for the development of a culture of the novel in the broader Ottoman space, a preliminary chapter provides an overview of the ways in which the emergence of the modern novel has been contextualized and explained, with a particular focus on recent scholarship that has focused on the inherently transnational character of the literary exchanges that permitted the so-called rise of the novel. Using the example of nineteenth-century Greek-Ottoman novelists, this chapter investigates the relationship between the novel and its textual and cultural contexts, as well as the transnational dimension of the genre’s development. Transposing the paradigm of the "literary Channel" that has been proposed to account for the circulation of novels between France and Britain in the eighteenth century, this chapter argues that the modern Greek novel can be conceptualized as a product of the movements of texts and authors across the interstitial space of the Aegean.