Emotions are fundamental to human life and culture; they are intimately related to consciousness and play a central role in cognition, expression and human behaviour. In recent years, advances in imaging technologies have allowed brain scientists to collect convincing evidence that emotional responses are not just hard-wired products of human evolution but are reflections of culture in the circuitry of a plastic brain. This means that emotions are ultimately historical and, therefore, legitimate objects of the broader study of culture and the history of culture.
The notion that emotions are historical and culturally determined has opened up an exciting new interdisciplinary and comparative field of study usually termed "the history of emotions", in which a range of disciplines from neuroscience to psychology, medicine, history, and literary and cultural studies interact productively in unusual combinations. Interest in this field has burgeoned into significant interest in the U. S. and several well-funded programs and institutes in Europe. Yet, in Middle Eastern studies and particularly in Ottoman and Turkish studies, the field is only in an infancy marked by encouraging signs such as the 2011 "Emotions East and West" conference held in Istanbul under the joint sponsorship of two Turkish universities and the Swedish Cultural History of Emotions in Pre-modernity group.
Our panel is based on the premise that emotions are a fertile framework for historical, cultural and literary analysis. As depicted in most literary products, emotions are the expressed and underlying connections between the material world as experienced by the subject and the rendering of this experience into a cultural product. We believe it is possible to argue that by closely studying the significant presence of emotional reactions in poetry, literature and painting, we will gain new insights into reconstructing the cultural, psychological and emotional past.
The proposed panel is an attempt to introduce an interdisciplinary approach to the history of emotions in the Ottoman context. The four papers included in this panel are focused on three emotions as depicted in literary and material products of the Ottoman Empire, namely, anxiety, love, and desire. Exploring the literary and historical context in which anxiety, love and desire appear in four different instances, we aim to put forward methodological questions regarding the history and study of emotions in particular historical moments of Ottoman society and culture. It is our aim that these studies will constitute a comparative ground for further enquiries and studies.
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Dr. Oscar Aguirre Mandujano
In this paper I explore the roles of love and desire in fourteenth and fifteenth century narratives of conquest and conversion and compare them to their roles in lyric courtesan poetry of the same period. I aim to advance the premise that desire represented a central element in explaining love as a driving force of victory over the infidel by renowned warriors (ghazis) as depicted in frontier narratives, as much as it was the driving force of spiritual victory in contemporary lyric and mystical poetry. I focus on different instances of stories of conquest and victory pertaining to three epic narratives, namely, Saltukname, Battalname and the Book of Dede Korkut. These epic cycles shared and reproduced stories in which the decisive element of victory or defeat was the love of a woman (wife, beloved, maiden) for the warrior. Expressed as an incontrollable feeling of union, love was triggered by desire and turned into impetus and action, finally resulting in measures (help, betrayal, sacrifice) necessary for victory and success.
The emotional responses of female characters to the physical beauty, gallantry, and chivalric values possessed by the heroes of these stories were embedded in a larger moral and ethical system. It is my contention that in these narratives the capacity for desire and love of the characters were thought to be necessary qualities in the hero/warrior: this perception was intrinsic to cultural understandings of morality, justice and good. The effects of beauty, love and desire have been studied for other literary products (mainly poetry) contemporary to the epic cycles analyzed here, but they have been overlooked in narratives of conquest and conversion. The cultural context of the production and reproduction of epic literature is the same as that of poetry, in which love and desire are considered to be central elements for understanding rulership, morality and religiosity. It is my contention that love and desire as depicted in the poems of lyric poets contemporary to the writing of these epic cycles, such as Sheyhi, Ahmet Pasha, and Necati, will help us to understand better the cultural milieu in which these stories were read, reproduced and rendered meaningful.
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Dr. Zeynep Seviner
This paper investigates the relationship between the emotion of envy, the central position of commodities and the new definitions of literary self as they are manifested in Halid Ziya's turn-of-the-century novel, Mai ve Siyah (serialized in 1896-7). Fueled by desire, envy is a central emotion in this novel, where the protagonist, Ahmed Cemil, often relates to the outside world through unconscious/repressed yet acute observations of what others have that he does not. It is used, not only as an element of the plot but also as a literary and stylistic medium in the novel, an essential regulator that informs major turning points in the storyline. In other words, the sequences in the novel are paced in accordance with the oscillations in Ahmed Cemil's psychological states that revolve around 'envy' and that eventually cause him to unhappily exile himself to an eastern province of the empire when all his dreams fall apart.
The objects of 'desire keep changing throughout and range from clothing and accessories, to decorations, furniture and books. In fact, commodities hold a particular significance in this novel not only as objects of Ahmed Cemil's desire, but also as crucial elements that define his personality. He conceptualizes happiness as being closely connected with private ownership. As a young man, he recalls his joy over the new house his father bought in Sultanahmet when he was a child; years later, he dreams of becoming a successful literary man through the ownership of a publishing house, a carriage and eyeglasses. He catches himself becoming envious of the libraries and new books that his best friend could easily buy thanks to his unlimited funds. His aspiration of becoming a renowned poet always goes hand-in-hand with the dreams of surrounding objects of luxury and expensive furniture. He brightens a regular day by touching the smooth texture of clothes in Bon Marche, sees the lithography machine as his “most unique asset,” and often converses with the objects in his room to express his innermost feelings. Mai ve Siyah thus calls for a close analysis of the role played by commodities and their relation to envy as an emotion, which will in turn tell us about the ways in which the literary self has been defined in the late-Ottoman imperial capital.
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Ms. Anat Goldman
The choices and representations of Ottoman territories and their inhabitants in 19th century Orientalist painting, this paper argues, were in many ways instrumental for the construction of European identity. A comparative analysis of over 350 paintings by more than 70 different artists showed similar psychological mechanisms playing similar role in diverse representations. These psychological mechanisms shaped the way Westerners looked at the Orient and, in turn, reveal the complexities that shaped 19th century European identity and its most prominent inner conflicts.
The paper sees Orientalist painters as part of a large group of artists and intellectuals that shared common values, beliefs and ideas, which underlay nineteenth-century European identity. Such an identity went beyond local differences and particularities. As part of the larger process of consolidating a broader European identity, this group of painters used “High Art” as a means to define the Orient and especially it’s Muslim inhabitants people as its ultimate “other”.
This paper claims that the psychological mechanisms seen in these paintings are response to a sense of anxiety, either caused by the "otherness" of life in the Ottoman territories these painters encountered in their travels, or in response to the tremendous social and economic changes and consequential social economic and political tensions in Europe at the time.
Anxiety is an emotional state manifested in universal physiological and psychological symptoms. Analytical psychologists see settled mental boundaries between “self” and “other” as fundamental to the individuals’ sense of security and stability and claim that any encounter, real or imaginary, with an “other” challenges these boundaries and can therefore result in anxiety.
Defense mechanisms are developed in response to anxiety and enable individuals to justify their actions and thoughts when encountering an “other” in a way that preserves their identity, mental boundaries, emotional stability and ability to function.
A textual analysis of these paintings which integrates Art History, Social psychology and theories of inter-cultural encounter, will show how the encounter of these painters with the “other” they found in the Ottoman territories was a source of anxiety for some and an instrument to explore inner European tensions for others.
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Dr. Elizabeth Nolte
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar—the prolific poet, author, literary historian and critic, and educator—is regarded by many scholars as the founder of modern Turkish literature. Born at the turn of the century, Tanpinar experienced firsthand the historic transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic as well as the sweeping reforms instituted by the new nation's leader, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Through Tanpinar's various public positions, he participated in the debates surrounding the formulation and understanding of the new nation's literary heritage and its aesthetics, language, and history. His final novel, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü (The Time Regulation Institute), which was serialized in 1954 and published in 1961, reflects these interests and explores the production and interrelatedness of public taste, literature, history, politics, and emotions. Tanpinar brings to the foreground the question of modernism and its emotional impact through the setting and content of the novel, with its implicit commentary on the Ottoman past and Atatürk's modernization reforms, and through the temporal, historical, and narrative anxiety experienced by the narrator. Tanpinar's topic of inquiry, time regulation, hits at the heart of the matter by using the tools of modernization—science and bureaucracy—to challenge historical and temporal linearity and the very concepts of modernity and progress. However, Tanpinar dangerously problematizes the novel's legitimacy by exposing its two foci—the Time-Setting Institute and the novel itself in the form of a memoir—as mere fictions. This problematization renders both the narrator and the reader riddled with anxiety.
In order to contextualize Tanpinar's problematization of narrative and authorship and his depiction of temporal, historical, and narrative anxiety, this paper will examine the production of the dual fictions of the Time-Regulation Institute and the memoir. Why does Tanpinar, himself an author, present a text that seemingly undermines the authority of authors and narrative? Why would Tanpinar cultivate a trustworthy narrator only to discredit him and the text? In order to approach an answer to these questions, one must examine the functions and interconnections of narrative, history, emotions, and audience. The danger and anxiety in Tanpinar's challenge lie not only in his insinuation that all narratives—national, historical, or literary—are to an extent fictional constructions, but also that narrative, however tenuous its authenticity, has the power to capture a reader.
