This paper problematizes the process of naming edebiyat (literature) as such to offer a new comparative study of literary modernity. Bringing together examples of criticism that question the scope, function, and effect of edebiyat as it emerges in comparison with and translation of the French term littérature in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, this paper argues that the institutionalization of literature as an autonomous discipline different from moral philosophy and science is a shared problematic that characterizes literary modernity across languages. Thereby, it challenges conventional narratives which position the Western (French in this case) epistemic domain as the supreme referent of modernity and read Ottoman literary and non-literary reforms in the nineteenth century in terms of subjectivity and representation. For Ottoman literati, this process involves negotiating the inheritance of edeb with its close ties to morality and learning as loosely defined in a trilingual and undivided Islamic literary geography. Under the rubric of Edebiyat-? Osmaniye (Ottoman Literature), the new way of literary world-making progressively detached itself from moral teaching and its ultimate divine referent, appertained more to questions of language, aesthetics, and genre, and differentiated between Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish. Moreover, the definition of new literature required demarcating a literary history that de-Islamicized the Arabo-Persian legacy in a universalized transnational literary genealogy, naturalizing constant exchange and transaction between languages, justifying heightened interactions with French texts in the nineteenth century, and securing a place for Ottoman literature within the worldwide literary relationality. To that purpose, my reading unpacks the semantic, moral, and genealogical content of edebiyat through three stages. It traces edebiyat as permutated from moral instruction in Nam?k Kemal, through scientific exposition in Be?ir Fuad, to aesthetic pleasure in Cenab ?ehabettin. As such, in effectuating the distinctions that play out in tension between the literary and the non-literary, the old and the new, the religious and the secular, the particular and the universal, the instantiation of edebiyat reminds us that the very break between old and new regimes of knowledge was not natural or neutral.

Despite its prolific publication record and notable popularity in the 1940s and 1950s, Turkish neo-spiritualism has hardly been taken as a topic of investigation by scholars of modern Turkey. This paper aims to engage analytically with this little-known venture in Turkish republican intellectual history. Combining the late nineteenth and early twentieth century western trend of spiritualism, or spiritism, with its local dynamics and socio-cultural structures, Turkish neo-spiritualist discourse represents a collage of scientific (and/or pseudo-scientific) arguments that integrates the spiritual philosophies of western spiritualists with the doctrines and practices of Islamic mysticism (Sufism). It hence sheds light on how an imported (western-alternative) discourse on the soul, the spirit, and the self axiomatically found itself in dialogue with internal dynamics and indigenous traditions while being transformed into, and accommodated within, the early Turkish republican socio-cultural context. Neo-spiritualism flourished as a novel discourse for reevaluating psychic matters and investing them with a new language in a period of top-down secularism in Turkey, during which religious institutions and options were officially banned. It had scientific or empirical contours yet was commensurable with religion and, thus, as this paper argues, it gained significant popularity in the early republican period by offering a legally viable alternative to Sufi discourses on spiritual issues.

Is there a recurring underlying cultural logic that continually frames Turkish social and political life regardless of the labels attached to the divisive issues of the particular period, like left-right in the 1970s and secularist-Islamist today? Turkey is not the only country exhibiting inter-group hostility, of course, but it appears to be an extreme case in which such sociocultural patterns con¬sistently undermine attempts at cooperation and unity. As such, it is an important test case for understanding the dynamics of political and social fragmentation and the emergence of inter-group violence. My research approaches these questions by focusing on central themes, like hostile group formation, authoritarian hierarchy and key cultural concepts of hero and traitor. These themes emerged from an oral history of the 1970s in Turkey, open-ended interviews with a wide variety of individuals who directly and personally experienced this period, set within a scaffolding of factual reports and secondary literature in Turkish and English about this period and two decades of ethnographic study of contemporary Turkish political life. I will suggest a model of factionalism, which I call spindle autocracy, in which I suggest that hierarchies that characterize Turkish political life are brittle because they are grounded in loyalty and obedience to a single central leader (the spindle around which raw recruits become networked, much as raw wool twines into yarn), rather than to the organization itself, its ideology, rules and procedures, or merit as a marker for leadership and promotion. Disagreements with the hero/leader thus become personal betrayals that require the "traitors" to leave the group, taking their networks with them and later reforming around new leaders in a continual process of fracturing into mutually hostile groups. These dynamics scale up into national polarization and violence punctuated by attempts at consolidation, for instance, through nationalist reformulations, constitutional and educational revisions, and rallies. The study crosses disciplinary boundaries, using insights from social anthropology as well as political science and psychology.