The journal Servet-i Fünun became one of the most important venues of literary production in late-19thcentury Ottoman Empire. Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem's efforts to spearhead a group of his students and writers around this magazine laid the foundations for a new chapter in Ottoman literary history, arguably instituting the early stages of Turkish modernism. The writers of the previous generation had already turned their gaze to the West in search of new forms and modes of expression, but the writers who gathered around this journal abandoned the explicitly social and pedagogical agenda of the Tanzimat writers in favor of a more rigorously developed aesthetic sensibility. Even though the aesthetic revolutions in 19thcentury Europe served as the primary reference point for these writers, the preference for elaborate, highly-individualized and musical expression created distinctive resonances with the classical Ottoman poetic tradition. The papers in this panel will attempt to go beyond the already existing scholarship's emphasis on adaptation and influence by focusing instead on the hybridization of certain aesthetic forms and experiences. How did the emergence of hybrid forms and new media influence artistic expression? What new conceptions of self, identity and sociality emerged in these literary works? Papers will also analyze the tensions that result from this early modernist insistence on a highly personalized expression. This modernist emphasis, along with hybrid forms, subsequently turned aesthetic mediation into an indispensable layer over reality, calling attention to the ways in which the aesthetic distance achieved by a subjective, stylized rendering of the world could offer more substantial frames around the values and norms that regulate social interaction. Attention will be given to the specific subjects, places, and social milieu to understand the social ambitions and limitations of this aesthetic mediation. Paper I will identify new conceptions of movement and flow which result from the influence of dance, pantomime, early cinema on literary productions of Tevfik Fikret and Halit Ziya. Paper II will study the hybridization of narrative forms among Servet-i Funun writers. Paper III will examine the influence of new media forms and devices such as photography on the autobiographical accounts of this period to outline changing conceptions of time, memory and self. Paper IV will analyze the short stories of Ahmet Hikmet Müftüo?lu that were published in the Servet-i Fünun journal, specifically Nakiye Hala, and describe how they reflect the aesthetic mediation process in the way they approach social issues.
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.
In “Ottomans and the Kodak Galaxy: Archiving Everyday Life and Historical Space in Ottoman Illustrated Journals,” art historian Ahmet Ersoy identifies a telling instance when a late nineteenth century Ottoman journalist/writer by the name of Ahmet Rasim (1864-1932) holds in his hands a printed copy of his own portrait photograph for the first time. Bewildered at the encounter with his past self preserved on paper in photographic form, he writes, “[I now realize] the retrieval of the past is a true source of consolation for a human being.”
Building on this example, this paper investigates the new ways of remembering, registering and projecting the self among the Ottoman people of letters, following the ‘photomechanical revolution’ that enabled the instant and accurate registry of selected moments of life. To this end, I trace the effects of a photographic imagery in a series of memoirs written by Ahmet Rasim’s contemporaries (including, Ahmet ?hsan, Hüseyin Cahit, and Halit Ziya), a representative mode that claims to emulate the outside world with unmediated photochemical precision, and see how memoirs work as devices of preserving/commemorating the past, as well as envisioning future selves.
Ahmet Hikmet Müftüo?lu (1870-1927) is an Ottoman diplomat, intellectual and author best known for his Turkist ideas and historical fiction published at the beginning of the 20th century in the late Ottoman public sphere. Before the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, however, between 1893 and 1900, Ahmet Hikmet produced close to two dozen short stories, most of them published in the Ottoman journal Servet-i Fünun. These stories were later published as a short story collection called Haristan ve Gülistan in 1900. This paper will analyze social issues covered in several of these short stories related to gender identities, criticisms of patriarchy, marriage, platonic love and romance. These stories rarely touched on political or ideological issues, yet contributed important snapshots of Ottoman society, gender relations, society’s expectations, the perceptions of marriage as an institution, and the functioning of households as nuclear units of society. In addition to this, running through stories such as Ye?enim (My Nephew) and Nakiye Hala (Aunt Nakiye) we can also find a critique of Westernization and a portrayal of how war effects real lives in Ottoman households.
Throughout this period, Ahmet Hikmet is playing with hybrid forms of narration and storytelling, as he moves between a fairy-tale structure in Haristan and Gülistan to a more realist, socially conscious short story form in Nakiye Hala and Ye?enim. It is therefore illuminating when the stories are analyzed in relation to each other as different tools with which Ahmet Hikmet visualized and criticized many different aspects of Ottoman identity at the time. The fact that these stories were first published in Servet-i Fünun is important as reading them allows us to locate these stories in the wider trend of Servet-i Fünun literati aspiring towards more aesthetic sensibilities. They provide for the reader a glimpse of the author before his writing became the major tool for disseminating Turkist ideals to his audience, when Ahmet Hikmet was possibly freer to play with and utilize different, hybrid modes of storytelling.
In the Ramadan of 1898, Servet-i Fünun’s chief editor Ahmet Ihsan and the popular writers of the magazine, Tevfik Fikret and Halit Ziya went to a circus at Sehzadebasi. They viewed an adaptation of Loie Fuller’s famous Serpentine Dance and a pantomime show at that circus. Tevfik Fikret’s “La Danse Serpentine” poem and Halit Ziya’s “Mösyö Kanguru” short story, both of which were published in Servet-i Fünun, were a product of the intense aesthetic experience of that night. For Stephen Mallarme, Serpentine Dance, invented and performed by Loie Fuller, should be a model for the modernist and symbolist poetry of the fin-de-siecle. It was also a popular theme of the early cinema: Lumiere Brothers and Edison made films of various performances of the dance.
Gilles Deleuze emphasized the affinity between fin-de-siecle dance, pantomime, and early cinema. In this paper, I will discuss the essential attributes of the intermedial and heterogeneous assemblage of Servet-i Fünun magazine focusing on Fikret and Halit Ziya’s texts. My main questions will be as follows: How “La Danse Serpentine” and “Mösyö Kanguru” represented body and motion? What were the roles of modern dance, pantomime and early cinema in the formation of Servet-i Fünun literature? How can we situate Servet-i Fünun literature in the context of the fin-de-siecle modernist literature? The theoretical works of Tom Gunning and Gilles Deleuze on early cinema will be my essential references.
