Language Strange: The Romantic Scene of Instruction in Twenty-First-Century Turkey

Abstract

Reflecting on my experience of teaching British Romantic literature at a Turkish university, this essay addresses the current conversation about global English by exploring the intersections among second-language literary study, translation theory, and Romantic aesthetics. It begins with a reconsideration of orientalism that traces a foreignizing impulse in canonical Romanticism, links this with Victor Shklovsky's concept ofostranenie(“estrangement”), and goes on to propose foreign language study as the exemplary instance of Romantic or Shklovskian aesthetic experience. Turning next to recent accounts, by Emily Apter and others, of Istanbul as the birthplace of “translational transnationalism,” I juxtapose the utopianism of contemporary translation theory with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poetic ideal of “untranslatableness.” I conclude with a reading of Orhan Pamuk's novel Snow, particularly its homage to Coleridge's “Kubla Khan,” as a meditation on translatability, before briefly revisiting the Turkish Romantic classroom and its global English futurity.