The Plebeian Aesthetics of World Literature in the Twentieth Century
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Minor Measures: The Plebeian Aesthetics of World Literature in the Twentieth Century by Firat Oruc Literature Program Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Fredric R. Jameson (Co-chair) ___________________________ Ranjana Khanna (Co-chair) ___________________________ Michael V. Moses ___________________________ Kenneth J. Surin Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2010 ABSTRACT Minor Measures: The Plebeian Aesthetics of World Literature in the Twentieth Century by Firat Oruc Program in Literature Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Fredric R. Jameson (Co-chair) ___________________________ Ranjana Khanna (Co-chair) ___________________________ Michael V. Moses ___________________________ Kenneth J. Surin An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2010 Copyright by Firat Oruc 2010 Abstract Focusing on a diverse set of creative work from Europe, East and South Asia, the Americas, Middle East, and Africa, Minor Measures investigates modalities of world writing through modernist, postcolonial and contemporary transnational literatures in the intertwined moments of imperialism, developmentalism and globalism. It studies the category of world literature as a heterogeneous set of narrative-cognitive forms and comparative modes of gauging from a particular positionality the world-systemic pressures on individual and collective bodies. To this end, Minor Measures focuses on the dynamic and increasingly central role of geoliterary imagination in fashioning a secular hermeneutic that maps the relationships and overlaps between the local and the global, here and there, past and present, self and other. Moreover, it highlights the capacities of the literary aesthetics in configuring local subjectivities, affiliations and histories in relation to the abstract cartographic totality of global modernity. Shuttling back and forth between the two poles, literature as world writing refers to the unconscious framework of representing the contingencies of the lived experience of economically, racially, and geographically differentiated subjects from metropolitan, (post)colonial and diasporic positions. iv Sevgili Eşim Nur’a… v Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. viii Preface............................................................................................................................................. 1 1 World Writing ......................................................................................................................... 4 1.1 Literature and the Posthistorical Existence .............................................................. 9 1.2 Agency in the World Literary Space ....................................................................... 21 2 The Grounds of World Literature ...................................................................................... 39 2.1 How Did Literature Appear in the World? ........................................................... 40 2.2 Mass Print and Mass-Subjectivity ........................................................................... 52 2.3 The Geopolitical-Comparative Field and Positional Measurement ................... 62 2.4 The Demotic Turn ...................................................................................................... 67 2.5 Worlding Tradition ................................................................................................... 76 3 Global Plebeianization and the Modernist Fiction .......................................................... 89 3.1 Unthinking Ideologies of Modernism .................................................................... 92 3.2 The Browns of the Earth ......................................................................................... 101 3.3 The Plebeian Series .................................................................................................. 113 4 Kaleidoscopic Nations: Postcolonial Disproportionality in the Age of Three Worlds ………………………………………………………………………………………………129 4.1 The Entanglement-Delinking Dialectic ................................................................ 134 4.2 Decolonial Emergence and Postcolonial Fall Back ............................................. 143 vi 5 World Literature after the Twentieth Century ............................................................... 159 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 177 Biography ................................................................................................................................... 199 vii Acknowledgements I am grateful of the continuous support of my committee in the long road to dissertation. Their work and intellectual caliber inspired me deeply. I learned from Fredric Jameson the dialectical vigilance for testing theoretical assumptions at multiple sea levels; from Ranjana Khanna the ethical care for difference and singularity in pursuing comparative work; from Kenneth Surin the search for frames of articulation and synthesizing multiple threads in a coherent argument; and from Michael Moses the attention to the social critical enunciations of literary texts. I thank them for these enduring insights and beyond. At Duke, in addition to those offered by my committee members, I benefited greatly from the graduate seminars of Toril Moi, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Alberto Moreiras, Janice Radway, George Lamming, and Marianna Torgovnick. I would like to thank Michael Hardt, Rey Chow, Negar Mottahedeh, Jane Gaines, Walter Mignolo, Grant Farred, David Need, Marcy Litle, Jehanne Geith, Leo Ching, miriam cooke, Ellen McLarney, Ebrahim Moosa, and Ara Wilson for extended and always stimulating conversations and feedback at different stages of the project. Erdağ Göknar, Srinivas Aravamudan and Ian Baucom kindly offered their help with their incisive comments on earlier versions of my work. I am also thankful to my former teachers, William Spanos, viii Immanuel Wallerstein, David Bartine, Jale Parla, Sibel Irzik Cevza Sevgen and Ahmet Isiklar. The following departments at Duke University provided me with financial support in the form of fellowship and teaching appointment: The Literature Program, International Comparative Studies, Slavic and Eurasian Studies, Women’s Studies, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Duke Summer Session Office and the Talent Identification Program. I thank Center for European Studies, Center for International Studies, Franklin Humanities Institute, and Duke University Graduate School for their research and conference travel support. I especially appreciate the generous assistance of the wonderful staff in these departments and centers. During my Ph.D. journey, I received incessant non-academic overseas support from my family members and acquaintances. I am grateful in particular to my in-laws Seniye, Yasar, Gonul, Fatih and Nurullah Bekin, and dear friend Erdal Ekinci. I would not survive the years of dissertation without the company of Nur, my soul mate. She kept me going at the expense of sacrificing from a lot from herself. Her patience and wisdom took the family through. I am immensely indebted to her. I also owe my children, Ikbal, Ebrar Sena and Erdem Tarik, an infinite number of unfulfilled promises that I had to postpone to either study or work on campus. I make promise (yet another one!) not to steal from their time anymore. ix The beginning and end of this dissertation coincided with the early loss of my father and my mother, respectively. May they rest in eternal peace. x Preface I- The rainladen trees of the avenue evoked in him, as always, memories of the girls and women in the plays of Gerhart Hauptmann....[A]s he passed the sloblands of Fairview he would think of the cloistral silverveined prose of Newman...[A]s he walked along the North Strand Road, glancing idly at the windows of the provision shops, he would recall the dark humor of Guido Cavalcanti...as he went by Baird's stonecutting works in Talbot Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow him like a keen wind, a spirit of wayward boyish beauty....His mind, when wearied of its search for the essence of beauty amid the spectral words of Aristotle or Aquinas, turned often for its pleasure to the dainty songs of the Elizabethans. 1 World literature haunts. It is a spectral guest that comes from some distant point in time and space. It walks with us and offers us imaginative and cognitive forms of relating ourselves to our own familiar environment. It is through The Count of Monte Cristo ’s spirit of adventure that Stephen constructs his cognitive mapping of Dublin. By imagining Dublin through Marseilles, he is able to chart “a skeleton map of the city.” The Count of Monte Cristo gives Stephen the courage to leave the city center and encounter in the customhouse “the rumbling strangeness of the life suggested to him by the bulks of the merchandise stocked along the walls.”2 It comes