Human Voice Echoing in the Silence of God

Abstract

The Ottoman literature of the second half of the nineteenth century has almost always been evaluated within the framework of a certain modernization discourse, which features a close connection with the post-Tanzimat Westernization process. This process is considered a rupture in the history of Ottoman literature, one determining the “beginning” of the modern and the “end” of the classical period. Within this discourse, the modernization of Ottoman literature is illustrated and revealed directly by Western influence and the “new” Ottoman literature is described as having emerged in the footsteps of the Western model as a one-sided and unattainable imitation. Accordingly, late nineteenth-century texts are coerced into revealing what is expected or predetermined in the context of being non-Western, peripheral, belated, or forcibly Westernized. In other words, the “new” Ottoman literature is situated within a history where the effects of traumatic Westernization held sway and the very experience of modernity is thus pushed aside. As Daryush Shayegan puts it, in the “Eastern” world, modernity has never been considered as a new paradigm, as it is within its own philosophical content, but always something responded to in terms of the traumatic changes it has wrought in traditions and ways of living and thinking. 1