Katy, Dana, and Ryan’s thought-provoking responses to last Friday’s post (Finding the Countercanon, below) sent me back to the cluster of essays on Turkey and world literature at the beginning of January’s issue of PMLA (123.1). These articles are, frustratingly, behind a paywall, but the titles below link to abstracts.
When we look to English-language readings of Turkish literature we see at play the problem of contexualized scholarship that sinks my idea of a countercanon. How few professors of English literature, writing about or teaching literature on a global scale, are sufficiently competent in cultural histories to acknowledge both the contexts and the methods of language use in more than a few closely-related cultures? What, ultimately, is the standard of expertise in the teaching of a literature at a cultural remove from your own?
Introduction: Exiles at Home—Questions for Turkish and Global Literary Studies by Hülya Adak.
Adak sees “historical and cultural context” as only the first part of the transcultural reader’s duty. She argues that an informed international readership will “listen to Third World literary criticism [. . .] to understand this criticism’s comparative modus operandi, its dialogue with the theories of the Euro-American academy (and with comparative analyses of works in the Western literary canon)” (25).
Adak sharply observes that it took “roughly a century [. . .] for literary scholars to realize that borrowing the novel as a genre does not just entail aping Western novels,” suggesting that good scholars of a literature read that literature both in its lingual context and in its relationship to any other literature (24).
(In the comments to Friday’s post, Ryan Williams links to an essay by Scott Esposito that comes to much the same conclusion by looking at the reception of Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives.)
But is this asking too much even of the professional reader? Don’t such demands impel the average literary scholar—those of us not yet tenured, not yet published in PMLA, but who teach the great majority of America’s students—to write and teach the one literature we imagine ourselves to more fully understand?
The Wounded Tongue: Turkey’s Language Reform and the Canonicity of the Novel by Jale Parla.
Parla reminds us of the dangers of a parochial literature. She sees canon-formation as a benign Darwinian process compared to the government’s attempt to impose their “puritanical cultural preferences” (34):
Just as it is true that canons are ideological formations, it is also true that overdomination of cultural life by a monolithic ideology may inhibit canon formation: lists and catalogs of writers and titles emerge rather than a body of works that are selected to survive. Moreover, the authors listed display a striking similarity of outlook and style because they have embraced a homogeneous worldview as the natural or normal cultural climate in which they are to function. Political space annihilates aesthetic space [. . .]. (28.)
Parla explores the literary effects of Turkey’s lingual modernization: the Turkish language invented in the 1920s and ’30s jettisoned the Arabo-Persian alphabet and vocabulary, meaning that “everything written before 1930 was buried in the archives of Turcology departments” because “the transcription of prerepublican literature into the modern Turkish alphabet was not encouraged” (29). But after the brutal 1980 junta, the emerging cultural preferences moved away from those of the “puritanical” republican period and revealed the canon’s plasticity.
Modernity and Its Fallen Languages: Tanpınar’s Hasret, Benjamin’s Melancholy by Nergis Ertürk.
Read alongside this canonical plasticity, Ertürk’s work on language and comparison suggests that language can encode its own history:
The allegorical language of the modern poet does not restore the lost past in its wholeness but rather represents, in alienation and reconciliation, the passage of time, in and into modernity. Language here is a medium in the extended sense, which includes and registers, without being able fully to represent, violent transformations of the historical conditions of possibility for its own use. The ghosts of the past here are ruins to which language is compared, not as lingering presences but as absent ones [. . .]. (53.)
(Those ghosts allude to Benedict Anderson’s The Spectre of Comparisons, which Ertürk quotes earlier: Anderson argues that the “proliferation of the institutions of capitalism [. . .] has given us new ‘quotidian universals that seep . . . through and across all print-languages, by no means in a unidirectional flow,’” 44.)
Although language may suggest these “quotidian universals,” Ertürk seems to argue, it remains trapped in its moment. This interplay of the international and the local thus offers a tool for meaningful comparison.
If it sometimes seems, from my ignorance-delimited view of world literature, that a Western scholar can choose to teach one literature well or multiple literatures poorly, Adak, Parla and Ertürk respond with mechanisms for global literary analysis that can be at least competent:
- Read local criticism with an eye to both history and method
- See all canons as contextual
- See literary language as inherently comparative
Well, I think I’ve mentioned my feelings about PMLA. I do think the issue is interesting, and in some ways it is similar to a discussion that’s been going on at the CHILD_LIT listserve recently. The another discussion digressed into a discussion of editing done to books originally published in places other than the US to prepare for US publishing – what cultural differences are explained, are words changed (boot vs. trunk), etc. It comes down to this question of the reader’s access to the author’s culture. Several people argued for keeping the differences and discussed the necessity of reading and examining difference in terms of our (children’s) development.
So I’m thinking about this tension: on one hand, reading/studying difference is good. On the other, it is dangerous and damaging. I’m going to focus more on teaching than scholarship here (research can be something different and can be part of pedagogy).
What I’m really finding interesting, though, is that in the situations you describe, there seems to be the assumption that the professor must be an expert or specialist in all aspects of the curriculum. This is a fairly top-down model of pedagogy. Granted, I’m from happy comp/rhet-land, but I don’t have a problem with constructing a classroom environment in which the class collectively learns about a text and its cultural-historical contexts. This can be a very rich learning environment that has the added benefit of helping students own their knowledge and learn how to learn both individually and as a group. I think its ok to say let’s learn about “x” together.
Apparently it has taken me 11 months to fully process your remarks, Katy. But I might be coming around to your way of seeing things.
If our standards for expertise remain as high as they have been for the past generation or so, instructors will be so tightly ensconced in the areas of their expertise that it will become even rarer to see a syllabus that gives something of the world tour that literature is supposed to be so good at.
If we buy into the theory that a collegiate lit course should teach its students to love reading, that argument alone makes me think that instructors like me should be given at least a semester’s training in how to teach texts whose contexts we will never fully know.