The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic & Turkish Literatures

C. Ceyhun Arslan’s book, The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures fleshes out the Ottoman canon’s multilingual character to call for a literary history that can reassess and even move beyond categories that many critics take for granted, such as ‘classical Arabic literature’ and ‘Ottoman literature.’ It analyzes how authors who have been studied as pioneers, such as Ziya Pasha (1829–1880) and Jurjī Zaydān (1861–1914), prepared the arguments and concepts that shape how we study Arabic and Turkish literatures today as they reassessed the relationship among the Ottoman canon’s linguistic traditions.

C. Ceyhun Arslan is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Koç University and Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Forum Transregionale Studien and Saarland University. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in journals and edited volumes such as Comparative Literature Studies, Journal of Arabic Literature, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, Middle Eastern Literatures, Sea of Literatures: Towards a Theory of Mediterranean Literature, Utopian Studies, Cambridge History of Middle Eastern Modernism, Convivium: Exchanges and Interactions in the Arts of Medieval Europe, Byzantium, and the Mediterranean, and The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry. His book, The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures, is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press, and it will appear in the Edinburgh Studies on the Ottoman Empire series. He is currently working on his second book project tentatively entitled Becoming Mediterranean: Views from Arabic, French, and Ottoman Literatures.

This event is Co-sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, the Department of Comparative Literature, and PATH+ (a Division of Literatures,Cultures and Languages Research Unit).