Azade Seyhan - Böcker

Azade Seyhan provides a concise, elegantly argued introduction to the critical theory of German Romanticism and demonstrates how its approach to the metaphorical and linguistic nature of knowledge is very much alive in contemporary philosophy and literary theory. Her analysis of key thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis explores their views on rhetoric, systematicity, hermeneutics, and cultural interpretation. Seyhan examines German Romanticism as a critical intervention in the debates on representation, which developed in response to the philosophical revolution of German Idealism. Facing a chaotic political and intellectual landscape, the eighteenth-century theorists sought new models of understanding and new objectives for criticism and philosophy. "Representation and Its Discontents" identifies the legacy of this formative moment in modern criticism and suggests its relevance to contemporary discussions of post-structuralism, orientalism, theories of textuality, and the nature of philosophical discourse.

Some of the most innovative writers of contemporary literature are writing in diaspora in their second or third language. Here Azade Seyhan describes the domain of transnational poetics they inhabit. She begins by examining the works of selected bilingual and bicultural writers of the United States (including Oscar Hijuelos, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Eva Hoffman) and Germany (Libuse Monikova, Rafik Schami, and E. S. Ozdamar, among others), developing a new framework for understanding the relationship between displacement, memory, and language. Considering themes of loss, witness, translation, identity, and exclusion, Seyhan interprets diasporic literatures as condensed archives of cultural and linguistic memory that give integrity and coherence to pasts ruptured by migration. The book next compares works by contemporary Chicana and Turkish-German women writers as innovative and sovereign literary voices within the larger national cultures of the United States and Germany.Seyhan identifies in American multiculturalism critical clues for analyzing new cultural formations in Europe and maintains that Germany's cultural transformation suggests new ways of reading the American literary mosaic. Her approach, however, extends well beyond these two literatures. She creates a critical map of a "third geography," where a transnational, multilingual literary movement is gathering momentum. Writing Outside the Nation both contributes to and departs from postcolonial studies in that it focuses specifically on transnational writers working outside of their "mother tongue" and compares American and German diasporic literatures within a sophisticated conceptual framework. It illustrates how literature's symbolic economy can reclaim lost personal and national histories, as well as connect disparate and distant cultural traditions.

Azade Seyhan's Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Modern Turkish Novel in a Comparative Context, second in the MLA series World Literatures Reimagined, offers a much-needed guide to the vast, underexplored territory of modern Turkish literature.Seyhan situates the Turkish novel in relation to such influences as the poetic and oral traditions of Ottoman Islamic culture, the early Turkish Republic, and Western Romantic and Enlightenment thought. She demonstrates that the evolution of the Turkish novel is inseparable from that of the Turkish state.Readers will discover a wealth of Turkish authors, from those with international renown, such as Ahmet Hamdi Tanp?nar and the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, to others less widely read. Among them are Re?sat Nuri Güntekin, whose Autobiography of a Turkish Girl prompted thousands of young Turkish women to seek teaching posts; Halide Edib Ad?var, who envisioned a harmonious coexistence of Islamic spirituality with Western ideals; Aziz Nesin, Turkey's master humorist, who instructs the reader in censor-resistant code; and Ya?sar Kemal and Adalet A?ao?lu and their blendings of myth, memory, and politics.Appendixes provide a chronology, a pronunciation guide to Turkish, and a list of modern Turkish novels in English translation, preparing readers to embark on further exploration.