Domesticating the avant-garde in a nationalist era: Aesthetic modernism in 1930s Turkey

2015 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 29-53
Author(s):  
Duygu Köksal
Keyword(s):  
Low Grade ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Plastic Arts ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
Republican Era ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
Bourgeois Modernity ◽  
European Modernism

AbstractThis paper investigates the rise of aesthetic modernism in Turkey’s early republican era (i.e., the late 1920s and the 1930s), with an emphasis on the influence of international cultural currents on Turkey’s intelligentsia. The paper concentrates on the modernist ideas and works of the D Group, who advocated a high modernism in the plastic arts, and the literary modernism of the socialist poet Nâzım Hikmet (Ran). Firstly, it addresses the historiographical argument that aesthetic modernism in Turkey was a derivative enterprise, a low-grade replica of European modernism. Secondly, it argues that the early republican intelligentsia found itself in a dilemma with regard to modernist currents. For them, aesthetic modernism was a sign of the modern epoch, but it also carried a radical potential for a critique of bourgeois modernity. Aesthetic modernism not only promised change, functionality, and renewal, but also manifested such disturbing symptoms of modernity as individualism, melancholy, degeneration, and restlessness. The paper reaches the conclusion that figures such as the D Group artists and Nâzım Hikmet translated the avant-garde international currents of aesthetic modernism into the early republican context, opting for positive and optimistic versions of modernism rather than adopting its more alienating, pessimistic, and despairing features. Through their works, an intellectual debate on aesthetic modernism was initiated in early republican Turkey.

Queering Lists: Culinary and Literary Modernism in The Book of Salt

MELUS ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 91-111
Author(s):  
Julia Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Old World ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Stylistic Feature ◽  
Critical Methodology ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Formal Feature

Abstract Lists, and the practice of listing, provide avenues of insight into Bình, the protagonist in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt (2003). Working as a cook in the infamous Stein Salon in Old World Paris, Bình, a narrative footnote extracted from The Alice B. Cook Book (1954), exercises a linguistic and culinary grasp shown to rival the resident darling couple’s own modernist projects. Demonstrating the narrator’s artistry under the radar, the list represents a formal feature that stages the particularities of queer aesthetics against the humanist backdrop represented by Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. As the novel spans geographical coordinates and varied temporalities, Bình’s curious expression of choice prompts narratological overlooking even as it tracks the desires of diasporic bodies and the taste of cherished dishes. Exercised with remarkable restraint, the generative accretions of running catalogs and errant recipes represent small acts of creativity in the novel. Simultaneously, the practice of listing foregrounds the enumerations as tactical sites of interruption and deferral, to constitute a critical methodology that reflects the list-maker’s precarity as a queer Vietnamese exile. This essay attends to the achievements of a minoritarian character who casts a shadow in the familiar archives of high modernism, as the “superficial” stylistic feature of the list opens up The Book of Salt to larger reflections on the intimate ties between coloniality and avant-garde experimentation.

Multisensory Modalities and Modernist Translation

CounterText ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-306
Author(s):  
Tamara Brzostowska-Tereszkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Reader Response ◽  
Sensory Integration ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Sensory Perception ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
The Arts

Multisensory and cross-modal perception have been recognised as crucial for shaping modernist epistemology, aesthetics, and art. Illustrative examples of how it might be possible to test equivalences (or mutual translatability) between different sensual modalities can be found in theoretical pronouncements on the arts and in artistic production of both the avant-garde and high modernism. While encouraging multisensory, cross-modal, and multimodal artistic experiments, twentieth-century artists set forth a new language of sensory integration. This article addresses the problem of the literary representation of multisensory and cross-modal experience as a particular challenge for translation, which is not only a linguistic and cross-cultural operation but also cross-sensual, involving the gap between different culture-specific perceptual realities. The problem of sensory perception remains a vast underexplored terrain of modernist translation history and theory, and yet it is one with potentially far-reaching ramifications for both a cultural anthropology of translation and modernism's sensory anthropology. The framework of this study is informed by Douglas Robinson's somatics of translation and Clive Scott's perceptive phenomenology of translation, which help to put forth the notion of sensory equivalence as a pragmatic correspondence between the source and target texts, appealing to a range of somato-sensory (audial, visual, haptic, gestural, articulatory kinaesthetic, proprioceptive) modalities of reader response.

scholarly journals Comics and Translation with a Multimodal Perspective in the Early Republican Era

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-142
Author(s):  
Göksel Öztürk ◽  
Aslı Özlem Tarakçıoğlu
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Multimodal Approach ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
Cross Media ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
Republican Era ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
Children's Periodicals

Comics has a “hybrid” interaction emerging from the “interplay” between pictorial and textual elements. However; many studies on comics translation focus on texts but disregarding pictures. Analyses performed by focusing on textual elements disregard pictorial and textual interactions, which is a kind of regression of the multimodal aspect of comics. One of the aims of this article is to treat comics on its own autonomy since comics is generally considered as a tool of other research areas. The present study investigates the functions of pictures and texts in the context of “pictorial turn” by keeping multimodal approach in perspective. Translated comics to be analysed are the first translated comic strips into Turkish after the alphabet reform. The very first concealed translations of comics during the Early Republican Era are analysed with a multimodal perspective considering historical context as well as cross-media interactions of pictures and texts. As the first Turkish translations of comics were published in children’s periodicals in the early Republican era, this article practices on multiple layers such as transformation of media, culture planning, and manipulation.

Howe, Irving (1920–1993)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saul Noam Zaritt
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Yiddish Literature ◽  
Democratic Socialism ◽  
Social Critic ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Cultural Innovation ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Irving Howe ◽  
Post War

Irving Howe was an American literary and social critic. Howe was a central figure in the circles of American democratic socialism as well as a prominent voice in post-war American literary criticism. Though he addressed a great number of literary topics and periods in his writing, Howe wrote important reflections on international literary modernism—in what Howe perceived as its last stages. Howe helped facilitate the rise of modernism in the cultural mainstream during the post-war period while remaining critical of the ways in which contemporary ideologies could appropriate the strategies of the literary avant-garde for exploitative and destructive purposes. Howe was particularly active in promoting modern Yiddish literature, initiating the translation and circulation of Yiddish writers who had previously been unknown to English-speaking audiences. Seeking to conserve a disappearing culture, Howe viewed Yiddish modernism as a compelling expression of the tension in modernity between tradition and cultural innovation.

Arabian Aesthetics in European Modernism

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-355
Author(s):  
Ferial J. Ghazoul
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Arabian Nights ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Diffusion ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Second World ◽  
European Modernism

This article focuses on one aspect of the impact of the Arabian Nights on Western literature that has been rarely addressed, namely its impact on modernism. Modernism is almost always viewed as a quintessentially European movement, self-generated between the first and second World Wars. From there it spread to the rest of the world. Despite its global diffusion, the imperial project has remained to be viewed in terms of the impact of the colonial powers over the colonized. My contention is that the cultural traffic was not one-way, but two-way. By considering the cultural traffic as going two ways, we instil an understanding of Modernism as a World Movement and recognize the constitutive part that Arabic poetics played in European Modernism. This article thus detects how the narrative logic of the most famous Arabian tales structured the works of the two pillars of High Modernism, Marcel Proust and James Joyce.

Modernism, Functionalism, and Tradition: The Music of Friedrich Goldmann

Tempo ◽  
1995 ◽  
pp. 27-30
Author(s):  
Alastair Williams
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The West ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Socialist Politics

The current reappraisal of tradition, along with an interest in a music that deals with concrete emotions and which has a direct appeal to audiences, sounds a certain resonance with the aesthetic doctrines that prevailed in the former communist bloc. A sense of history is vital to socialist politics, but the availability of a symphonic tradition to Soviet composers after a break with that heritage suggests a state of posthistoire; a condition normally associated with postmodernism. The postmodernist reappraisal of the past is anticipated by, for example, Shostakovich's complex and sometimes ironic relationship to the symphonic tradition. Conservative traditionalism in the East maintained to be a critique of high modernist principles; in the West, ironically, a turn to tradition is now put forward as an alternative to the same rationalist modernism. At the moment when the achievements of the historical avant-garde and of high modernism have become fully available to the former Eastern Europe, the former Western Europe is engaged with the reappraisal of tradition. Even where a modernist music did develop in Eastern Europe – as, for example, it did in Poland – it was followed by a move back to more traditional techniques. The consequence of this inclination is that composers such as Górecki and Pärt, who employ traditionally-based expressive languages, have shot onto centre stage. The point is that composers from the former communist bloc have already encountered many of the issues that now preoccupy some contemporary composers in the capitalist West.

Art and Power in Turkey: Culture, Aesthetics and Nationalism During the Single Party Era

2004 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 91-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duygu Köksal
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Turkish Republic ◽  
Cultural Policies ◽  
Plastic Arts ◽  
Political Studies ◽  
New Republic ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
Shed Light

One prominent intellectual of the early Turkish Republic, İsmail Hakkı Baltacıoğlu, argued that the new Republic should be “a Republic of fine arts.” Indeed, the early Republican project in Turkey perceived culture and art as media through which the Republic could not only represent its achievements but also “create” itself. The present study focuses on the cultural policies and elite perceptions of culture during the single-party regime in Turkey. More specifically, it looks into the developments that took place in the plastic arts and in elite approaches towards aesthetics. This is done in order to shed light on young Turkey's cultural modernization. Examining the interaction between aesthetics and power, this discussion stands at the intersection of political studies and cultural history.

scholarly journals RUSSIAN LITERARY MODERNISM AND ITS INFLUENCE ON BULGARIAN LITERATURE

2020 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 203-224
Author(s):  
Magdalena Kostova-Panayotova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Russian Symbolism ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Russian Literary ◽  
Russian Modernism ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact ◽  
European Form

The paper discusses to what extent major currents and representatives of Russian modernism and the Avant-garde had influenced the works of prominent representatives of 20th-century Bulgarian literature such as L. Stoyanov, Liliev, Debelyanov, Trayanov, Sirak Skitnik, and many others. In addition to addressing the influence of Russian symbolism on Bulgarian writers, the article examines the impact of Acmeism on the work of El. Bagryanа and At. Dalchev; the one of Imaginism on the work of Bulgarian modernists from the 1920s such as Slavcho Krasinski, Geo Milev and others. The intertwining of features of the poetics from different avant-garde currents, both in the works of individual authors and in the works of a single writer appeared as a typical phenomenon in the life of the Bulgarian avant-garde. Such poets as N. Furnadzhiev, A. Raztsvetnikov, N. Marangozov and others, and fiction writers as Ch. Mutafov, A. Karaliychev, A. Strashimirov, J. Yovkov, repeatedly experienced the influence of contradictory modernist and avant-garde currents, however, in their works they managed to add the “European form” to the “Bulgarian content”. The study also involves Bulgarian avant-garde journals such as Crescendo, Libra/Vezni, etc. This paper argues that by going against the rules, the avant-garde writers created a productive artistic method, a kind of alternative classic.

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