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- From the History of a Genre to the History of Ottoman Literature: A Historicist Look at the First Century of Ottoman Biographies of Poets
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From the History of a Genre to the History of Ottoman Literature: A Historicist Look at the First Century of Ottoman Biographies of Poets
Zeynep Altok
13 December 2014 15:00 Salon: ZEYREK SALONU
In our 17th program of the series Classical Turkish Literature Talks initiated in 2011-12, we will host Zeynep Altok on December 13rd 2014. Altok will make a speech about “From the History of a Genre to the History of Ottoman Literature: A Historicist Look at the First Century of Ottoman Biographies of Poets”
Poets' biographies (tezkire) have been the single most important source for the study of Ottoman literature. In spite of their crucial disciplinary role, however, they have not really been studied in themselves from a historicist point of view. Like all texts, poets' biographies too present a partial picture of the social context from which they emanate, one that has been refracted through the lense of generic conventions and become unrecognizable at first sight. By going back and forth between text and context, the historian's task is to explore the social and cultural context that underlies the poets' biographies, and how the biographies are transformed in time along with the changing context. While biographical writing on Ottoman poets have often been characterized as an unbroken tradition that streches from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, this talk will highlight ruptures and transformations, defining the first century (from roughly the 1530's to the 1630's) of the genre as a period with unique characteristics. In contrast to the conventional explanation for the emergence of the Ottoman tezkire that points to the influence of Timurid Herat, "local" motivations for the genre will be emphasized and the social and cultural needs that it spoke to will be explored. A discussion of other genres that had a lifespan coeval with the first phase of tezkire writing and that waned or died out by the 1630's will be brought up to formulate questions and observations about the broader issue of the periodization of Ottoman literature.
Classical Turkish Literature Talks-17
From the History of a Genre to the History of Ottoman Literature: A Historicist Look at the First Century of Ottoman Biographies of Poets
Zeynep Altok*
13 December 2014
Zeyrek Hall
Organized by Meryem Babacan
The event will be held in Turkish, and is free to public.
*İstanbul Bilgi University
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As the most traditonal activity of BISAV, the courses take place in every fall and spring of a year.
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