1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910821861803321

Autore

Konuk Kader

Titolo

East-West mimesis : Auerbach in Turkey / / Kader Konuk

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Stanford, Calif., : Stanford University Press, c2010

ISBN

0-8047-7575-3

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (316 p.)

Disciplina

809

B

Soggetti

Literary historians - Turkey - Istanbul

Philologists - Turkey - Istanbul

Jewish refugees - Turkey - Istanbul

Humanism - Turkey - History - 20th century

Turkey Intellectual life 20th century

Europe Intellectual life Turkish influences

Turkey Civilization Western influences

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front  matter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Humanism Goes East -- 2. Turkish Humanism -- 3. Mimicry in Modern Turkey -- 4. Germany on the Bosporus -- 5. Writing Mimesis in Istanbul -- Epilogue: Turkey’s Humanist Legacy -- Appendix: Lectures by Erich Auerbach in Turkey -- Notes -- References -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

East West Mimesis follows the plight of German-Jewish humanists who escaped Nazi persecution by seeking exile in a Muslim-dominated society. Kader Konuk asks why philologists like Erich Auerbach found humanism at home in Istanbul at the very moment it was banished from Europe. She challenges the notion of exile as synonymous with intellectual isolation and shows the reciprocal effects of German émigrés on Turkey's humanist reform movement. By making literary critical concepts productive for our understanding of Turkish cultural history, the book provides a new approach to the study of East-West relations. Central to the book is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The



Representation of Reality in Western Literature, written in Istanbul after he fled Germany in 1936. Konuk draws on some of Auerbach's key concepts—figura as a way of conceptualizing history and mimesis as a means of representing reality—to show how Istanbul shaped Mimesis and to understand Turkey's humanist reform movement as a type of cultural mimesis.