Philology Went down to the Crossroads of Modernity to Meet Orientalism, Nationalism, and... Ottoman Poetry

Abstract

Ottoman poetry is an empty sign. It floats, unfettered by the correspondence between words and things conventional to the typically modern signification of historical realities. But the sign (under which many of the other written Ottoman humanities—philosophy, literary-critical writing, fine art literature, and thought in general—tend to be subsumed) is not exactly empty. It carries double, or overdetermined, meaning. Though empty of poetry the term Ottoman poetry does not, for most people, call Ottoman poetry to mind—it is full of other things in so far as the sign is “read” as a rhetorical figure, a symbol, an allegory of the national narrative. And since the middle of our century, at the latest, when the first generation born into the Turkish Republic had come of age, it has continued to be read this way. That is, the allegory continually displaces the reality. Either the poetry is not known and there is no poetry in mind to recall, or, if it is known, the experience of recall is overdetermined in ways that can be connected with the poetry only through an analysis of the history of its modern reception, probably beginning with Young Ottoman polemic c. 1860's-1880's.