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A Novel of Hybrid Lives and Hybrid Narratives: Safveti Ziya’s In the Corners of Salons (1888-9)
Abstract
Proliferation of memoir as a literary form in the Ottoman Empire corresponds to the formation of the New Literature group gathered around the Servet-i Funun Journal in the last decade of the 19th century. The former generation of writers had asserted their politics, ethics, and selves to the reading public through a highly didactic, omnipotent, and playfully intrusive narrative voice. The novelists of the Servet-i Funun group, on the other hand, erased their individual voices from their carefully crafted examples of realist novels depicting remarkably Westernized milieu of Istanbul’s elites and preferred to document their literary and political identities in their voluminous memoirs. Safveti Ziya (1875-1929), one of the few Servet-i Funun writers without a memoir, in his debut novel In the Corners of Salons, creates a hybrid narrative form by breaking down the boundaries between fiction and memoir and projects himself as the protagonist Sekip, the ultimate dandy. Based on Ziya’s novel, this paper will explore the hybridization of narrative forms by the Servet-i Funun group and claim this technique as an essential process for the aesthetic representation of the self.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Ottoman Empire
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries