The Written Word Under Pressure: Namık Kemal (1840-1888) and The Beginnings of Modern Turkish Prose

Date: 

Wednesday, January 30, 2019, 4:30pm to 6:00pm

Location: 

CMES, Rm 102, 38 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138

The Sohbet-i Osmani Lecture Series presents

Emrah PelvanogluNamik Kemal
PhD, Department of Turkish Language and Literature Teaching, Yeditepe University, Istanbul

The current literature on the beginnings of the modern Turkish literature have mainly focused on the development of European prose genres, particularly the novel, following the 1870s. The aim of this talk is to re-evaluate the emergence of the modern Ottoman-Turkish prose through the traditional stylistics habit in the same period and to highlight the changes and continuities in narrative styles by focusing on Namık Kemal’s writings.

Emrah Pelvanoglu is the director of freshmen Turkish program at Yeditepe University, Istanbul, and also he is the Chair of the Department of Turkish Language and Literature Teaching. He has been a visiting researcher at the CMES since September. He obtained his PhD from the Department of Turkish Literature, Bilkent University, Ankara, in 2011 with his dissertation "Tanzimat and Metahistory: Poetics of Namık Kemal's Historical Narratives", which has been published a short time since by the Vakıfbank Cultural Publications.

Contact: Liz Flanagan