Guided by postcolonial perspectives, scholars of Ottoman and Turkish studies have inquired into historical, political, and cultural manifestations of a notion of Ottoman imperialism. In particular, these perspectives have helped to delineate a late Ottoman mindset grounded in a colonial paradigm of civilization toward the empire’s Arab lands and subjects. In my paper, I argue that this dynamic can be clarified by looking at the emergence of a new literary epistemology in the late imperial setting. As the focal point of my analysis, I revisit the 1898 debate between Bahai Efendi, Hüseyin Cahit Yalçın, and Mustafa Sabri on “the uses of Arab sciences,” which has attracted scholarly attention due to its enactment of a clash between secularism and Islamism. Focusing on understudied themes of this debate, I show how conflicting figurations of “language,” “literature,” “aesthetics,” and “translation” across this debate help us measure the turn-of-the-century transformations in Ottoman letters against the late imperial politics. To this end, I examine connections and contestations across the discursive field that ranges from the quarrel between Bahai Efendi and Yalçın about “the Arab sciences” on the pages of Ṭarіḳ to Sabri’s polemic against the latter to Yalçın’s S̠ervet-i Funūn treatises on the notion of aesthetics. Juxtaposing these attempts to define and redefine the contours of literary and aesthetic production and reception in the late Ottoman Empire, I make a case for the emergence of a new politics of aesthetics in the Ottoman cultural field. Critically engaging with this series of literary and epistemological transformations in the late Ottoman Empire, I further argue, enables us to see often-overlooked entanglements of orientalist, westernist, and nationalist dispositions within the project of Ottoman modernization as well as helps us reach a more nuanced understanding of “the secular” within this framework. In conclusion, I probe how Yalçın’s and Sabri’s later careers expose the very limits of these transformations in relation to the early twentieth-century cultural atmosphere in Turkey and the wider Middle East.