The poetics of sameness in “Ottoman divan literature”

Abstract

A relatively large number of writers in Arabic, Turkish and Persian came from Bosnia during the Ottoman period. This part of our cultural heritage has been quite extensively studied as the legacy of oriental languages, usually applying the methods of classic philology, without entering into the question of the value of the works. Scholars cannot agree whetherthey belong to the Ottoman or the Bosniac literary heritage; the argument is dominated by ethnocentric criteria, as they view the works from today’s standpoint, disregarding the standards of the time in which they were produced. However, this paper demonstrates that projecting our present-day standards back onto a different past is academically questionable. During the Ottoman period, literary writing was markedly polycentric, evolving in a system that was strikingly supranational and cross-cultural. A positivist approach to the heritage can neither determine nor explain these facts, which come fully into their own in poetological and cross-cultural studies. The writers of that time did not aspire to originality or to promoting distinctivenational characteristics, but were fully aware, as they composed their works, that they were doing so in the context of “the poetics of sameness,” or inductive poetics, in which tradition is affirmed as a supranational value system. As a result, the poetics of sameness may also be formulated as the poetics of intertextuality and citation, with all their subtypes. Our public still lacks proper studies of that kind; rather, the idea of ethnocentricity as diversity is still in favour, contrary to theundeniable poetological arguments in the approach to this literary legacy.