Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies

Life Simplified: Aristotle on Mimesis and the Universality of Poetry

Hakan Yücefer — 2025-10-23

In Chapter 9 of the Poetics, Aristotle says that poetry is more philosophical and valuable than history, because it is rather concerned with the universals, whereas history tells us the particulars. The aim of this article is to understand Aristotle’s claim about the universality and philosophical nature of poetry within the context of the Poetics, that is, within the framework of the discussion on how the story or plot should be constructed in a successful tragedy. The article first discusses the tensions inherent in the idea that poetry rather expresses the universals, and the suggestions offered in the secondary literature to resolve these tensions. Then, it is shown that Aristotle introduces two different concepts of life when talking about life throughout the Poetics, and it is argued that the poet constructs a second life by simplifying the ordinary life, which is inimitable due to the randomness and multiplicity of the events that make it up. The poet builds her story through this simplification, and the subject of poetic mimêsis is nothing other than this simplified life. The universality of poetry is not based on revealing universal truths about life, but on the fact that the same plot, constructed by simplifying life, and which will necessarily lead to happiness or unhappiness, can be repeated in different cases by changing the names of the characters, places and times.

The Architecture of Mimesis in Plato and in the Quran

Victoria Rowe Holbrook — 2025-10-23

The way we understand mimesis is fundamental to epistemology, physics, and representation in political life as well as in the arts. Can truth/reality be copied? The most enduring understanding of what truth and reality are has come to us from Plato, who launched an attack on poetry as false representation of the divine. Although a rarely defined Neoplatonism is routinely attributed to the ninth and tenth-century philosophers who wrote in Arabic, I and others have overlooked how much of Plato there is in the whole of Islamicate literature and culture, beginning with the linguistic environment of the Quran. But it is well known that Plato was revered in historical Islamicate societies; Ibn Sina (Avicenna, d. 1037) and many others referred to him as “the divine Plato,” and considered him a prophet in the monotheistic tradition. There is now a small body of work on mimesis and Islam, but here I will look specifically at Platonic topics found in the Quran with regard to mimesis and poetry, and the kind of methodology needed to appreciate them.

The Imitation by Not Imitating: Duns Scotus on Self-determined Rationality as Imago Dei in Humans

Ana Lomadze — 2025-10-23

The concept of imitation creates a paradoxical paradigm in Duns Scotus’ philosophy. Following the traditional framework, this medieval thinker considered rational power to be imago Dei, i.e., God’s image in humans. A human’s finite rationality imitates the divine being as an image resembles and imitates the object it depicts. This common medieval assumption—strongly connected with the theological context—is also interesting from an ontological point of view, as it clarifies historical discourse concerning the relation between the principle of beings and beings themselves. Duns Scotus’ theory of imitation merits consideration because it includes not only the necessary causal aspect but also the contingent, free element of the relation. Scotus identifies rational power with free will. This presumption leads the thinker to a provocative theory of imitation. For rational finite beings, the method of imitation is paradoxically “not to imitate.” Unlike all nonrational beings, which imitate by following pre-determined nature, rational beings can imitate by not imitating and being free in their volitional acts.

Wandering Metaphors, Woven Worlds

Zakir Hussein Gul — 2025-10-23

This article traces the migration of key metaphors and Wanderwörter across the Islamicate world, examining how terms rooted in Buddhist, Manichaean, and Brahmanical lifeworlds were reimagined in Persianate poetics and their Ottoman afterlives. Figures such as the Chinese Buddha-idol, the Sanskrit maṇḍala, and the Persian dīv illustrate a larger pattern: concrete referents from Inner Asia and India were divested of their original religio-philosophical associations and reconfigured within an expansive Islamic literary framework, often inverted in value or enriched with new semantic layers. At the centre of this study is the Persian nigār, or icon, traced from its pre-Islamic origins through its reincarnation in Turco-Persian verse as the “icon gallery of China,” to its subsumption into the language of philosophical Sufism in twentieth-century Ottoman Istanbul. By following such metaphors in motion, this article reveals an integrated literary world not passively syncretic but actively appropriative, in which poets and mystics adapted foreign imagery to new aesthetic, metaphysical, and political ends, underscoring the adaptability and versatility that so came to define Persianate poetics.

The Long Century of Mimesis: The Representation of Reality and the Concern for Style in 19th Century

Kerem Eksen — 2025-10-23

The nineteenth-century is widely recognized as a key period in Western art history, during which the dominant traditional trends in the representation of reality were deeply questioned and transformed. Even a cursory glance at the major paintings of the time reveals striking differences in both attitude and technique between the academic approach that prevailed at the beginning of the century and the modernist styles that marked the last decades. According to a classic narrative, the Romantics’ emphasis on expressing the artist’s inner life at the expense of the mimesis of nature laid the groundwork for subsequent transformations. My goal in this article is to search for a satisfactory explanation for the changes in nineteenth-century approaches to mimesis, without relying on a clear opposition between mimesis and expression that the classic narrative may imply. I mainly argue for a narrative centered on the artists’ pursuit of original modes of expression and distinctive temperaments, which I will briefly name as a “concern for style.” This alternative framework, I suggest, offers a better standpoint than the “mimesis vs. expression” opposition and the resulting narrative. To support this claim, I will begin by examining the transformation of French painting, focusing in particular on Eugène Delacroix and his influential advocate Charles Baudelaire. Through their works and ideas, I will explore how the diminishing centrality of mimesis can be understood in more nuanced terms. In the second part, I will introduce and elaborate on the idea of the “concern for style” as the central component of my argument, once again drawing primarily on Delacroix and Baudelaire. Finally, I will turn to some prominent “Realist” figures—most notably Gustave Flaubert—to show that the concern for style has been as central for them as it has been for the Romantics. In this way, I aim to show that this concern provides a good interpretive framework for understanding the nineteenth-century art as a whole.

The Real in Imitation: Metaphor and Mimesis in Graham Harman's Philosophy

Hakan Atay — 2025-10-23

American philosopher Graham Harman (b. 1968), in his philosophy called Object-Oriented Ontology (abbr. OOO), assigns new functions to the classical notions of metaphor and mimesis. In this new philosophical endeavor, which claims to explain everything through the tension between objects and their qualities, metaphor becomes one of the possible ways of producing aesthetic experience, while mimesis becomes the sine qua non of this production. For Harman, whose thinking has matured by drawing on the tradition of phenomenology, these two notions become central to philosophical inquiry because the only way to access reality, even if indirectly, is through aesthetic experience. Metaphor is defined as the ability to allude to a real object by exploiting the tension between sensual objects—objects that exist only through encounter with real objects—and sensual qualities. Mimesis, or imitation, is redefined as the necessity of taking the place of the hidden and withdrawn real object and turning into it. Harman, thus, presents a new model of imitation to counter classical understandings of mimesis. This article, drawing its inspiration from the philosopher’s essay “A New Sense of Mimesis,” introduces this new model into discussion. It also attempts to demonstrate why Harman’s harsh criticism of irony, based on the new model, contradicts the model’s own functioning.

Plastic Figures: Mimesis, Metamorphosis, Techniques of the Self

Nidesh Lawtoo — 2025-10-23

While dominant idealist traditions in western philosophy tended to restrict mimesis to visual representations far removed from ideal Forms, a minor, yet nonetheless resilient genealogy of materialist thinkers has tended to focus on the mimetic nature of subjectivity itself. Building on the interdisciplinary field of mimetic studies sensitive to the plastic forms homo mimeticus can take, this essay furthers Catherine Malabou’s re-evaluation of form by outlining a new materialist genealogy of four plastic figures endowed with the capacity to both receive form and give form: namely, “figura,” “metamorphosis,” “techniques of the self,” and the “overman.” Reframed in the company of ancient (Plato, Homer), modern (Montaigne, Nietzsche), and contemporary (Hadot, Foucault) theorists, the essay argues, in broad genealogical strokes, that the mirroring concepts of plasticity and figura traverse key moments in the history of aesthetics. My wager is that plastic figures are endowed with performative powers central to techniques of subject formation that reach from antiquity to modernity into the present, furthering the field of mimetic studies.

Mimesis Reconfigured

Şafak Horzum — 2025-10-23

This article rethinks the concept of mimesis through the lenses of feminist theory, material feminism, and posthumanism. It argues that the mimetic is no longer a matter of aesthetic resemblance or passive imitation but a dynamic, embodied, and ethical mode of becoming. The study, challenging the classical, gendered binaries embedded in Platonic and Aristotelian frameworks, traces how thinkers such as Irigaray, Cixous, Butler, Barad, Alaimo, Braidotti, Malabou, and Lawtoo reconceptualize mimesis as an intra-active, plastic, affective contagion with relational inclinations. Drawing on these reconfigurations, the article offers a constellation of literary analyses from British women writers—ranging from Marie de France and Julian of Norwich to Mary Shelley, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and Jeanette Winterson— showcasing how mimesis operates as a site of corporeal inscriptions, ethical resonances, and onto-epistemological transformations. Across six thematic clusters—mystical affect, reproductive horror, spatial confinement, temporal fluidity, post-traumatic haunting, and interspecies becoming—the essay demonstrates how British women’s literature mobilizes mimetic processes to reimagine embodiments beyond representational captures. In doing so, it proposes a mimetic ethics grounded in vulnerability, response-ability, and co-becoming, and offers new directions for material-feminist literary criticism and posthumanist thought.

Grotesque Femininity and the Crisis of Representation in Lady Oracle and The Gaze

Henrieta Krupa — 2025-10-23

This article examines how Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle and Elif Shafak’s The Gaze mobilize grotesque femininity to destabilize the mimetic ideals of beauty, coherence, and narrative unity. Both novels center on protagonists whose excessive bodies and fractured identities render them unreadable within dominant aesthetic frameworks, thereby raising critical questions about who may be represented, desired, or made visible. Drawing on feminist theory—particularly Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection, Luce Irigaray’s critique of phallocentric discourse, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque—the study develops the concept of abject mimesis: a feminist representational strategy in which distortion and excess expose the exclusions that sustain mimetic norms. In Lady Oracle, Joan’s grotesque embodiment and parodic use of popular genres disrupt the logic of coherence and closure. In The Gaze, the unnamed obese narrator and the novel’s structure reveal the violence embedded in visual regimes. Taken together, these texts reconfigure mimesis not as faithful imitation but as rupture, where bodily and narrative excess become sites of feminist resistance. By pairing Atwood’s postmodern irony with Shafak’s mythopoetic layering, the article advances a theory of abject mimesis as a feminist poetics of grotesque excess, contributing to debates in feminist aesthetics, genre studies, and the politics of representation.

Grotesque Sound Poetics and Performative Mimesis in Edith Sitwell’s “Polka”

Tuğba Karabulut — 2025-10-23

Edith Sitwell, a paradoxical figure in British modernism—both celebrated and critically underestimated—made significant contributions to experimental poetics through her innovative use of sound, abstraction, and performance. Her poem “Polka,” from the Façade collection (1922) exemplifies her grotesque sound poetics through rhythmic excess, sonic fragmentation, and performative mimesis, exposing the unstable theatricality of imperial and gendered constructs. This article explores “Polka” through the intertwined lenses of grotesque sound poetics and performative mimesis, arguing that it dismantles traditional lyric structures and reconfigures poetic voice as a site of distorted performativity. Sitwell challenges British imperial and gendered narratives within a broader framework of identity formation, cultural memory, and imperial fantasy. By mimicking, rather than mirroring, the absurdities of reality, the poem subverts conventional mimesis, revealing dominant identities as illusory and unstable. Central to this performative mimesis is Mr. Wagg, a grotesque vaudevillian whose repetitive dance and fragmented speech transform identity into theatrical spectacle. Historical icons like Nelson, Wellington, Byron and Crusoe are reduced to props within decaying imperialism, stripped of their grandeur. Repositioning “Polka” within modernist sound poetics and performative mimesis, this study argues that Sitwell transforms poetry into a performative stage where identity, gender and imperial fantasies collapse into parody.

Mimesis as a Multilayered Practice in Melih Cevdet Anday’s Raziye

Göze Orhon — 2025-10-23

This article analyzes the concept of mimesis in its theoretical plurality and aims to interpret Raziye, a novel by Melih Cevdet Anday, through this pluralistic framework. While mimesis has traditionally been defined as a relationship of representation and imitation, over time it has acquired new meanings across various theoretical approaches. Taking into account its historical and conceptual transformations, this study argues that mimesis cannot be reduced to a singular definition and, on the contrary, should be conceived as a generative possibility for meaning-making. Drawing selectively from a theoretical trajectory that spans from Antiquity to the twentieth century, the analysis foregrounds the inherent multiplicity of the concept. Raziye is examined through three interrelated thematic lenses shaped by this framework: mimesis as social theory, the mimetic construction of space, and the scope and relationality of nature representation embodied in the character of Raziye. Each of these themes reveals distinct mimetic practices within the novel, and throughout the analysis, mimesis is considered not merely as an aesthetic category but also as a term embedded in historical and social contexts. This reading, grounded in the plurality of mimesis, offers a flexible and pluralistic methodological proposal applicable not only to Raziye but to similar interpretative endeavors.

Self as a Failed Project in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape

Candan Kızılgöl Özdemir — 2025-10-23

This study aims to provide an analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape with reference to the concepts of memory, subjectivity, and selfhood, arguing that the self is a constructed idea rather than something inherent to the subject as such. Taking the monologic and dialogic qualities of the play as its point of departure, the study examines the character Krapp in light of his project of archiving his past selves in the form of voice recordings he makes over the years. In the play, it is evident that by using these recordings as a tool for fashioning himself a consistent self, Krapp ends up creating a breach between his past and present selves instead, thereby failing in his project. Focusing also on the role of time and memory in the construction of the self, the study draws the conclusion that the play succeeds in revealing the discontinuous and inconsistent nature of any such process in and through Beckett’s manipulation of the techniques of characterisation associated with realist drama.

The Translations of Aesop’s Stories in Letâ’ifü’l-Hikâyât

Seda Kurt — 2025-10-23

Most of these stories are fables that use the art of personification to give animals a voice, leading to their common designation as Aesop’s fables. Initially written in Greek and Latin, these fables were translated into various languages from the fifteenth century onwards. Researchers have indexed these translations, allowing them to be grouped under the Aesopic tradition. Within this framework, Aesop’s stories are analyzed in two categories: “Aesop’s Life” and “Aesop’s Stories.” Almost all Turkish translations focus on Aesop’s stories, with only one including brief information about Aesop’s life in its introduction. The author of Letâ’ifü’l-Hikâyât, found in the Turkish Language Institution Manuscripts (number A306), is unknown. This work begins with anecdotes about Aesop’s life and continues with stories, primarily fables, narrated in his voice. Although this work has been introduced in previous studies, the indices have not been addressed, and misreadings of words in the text have led to inaccurate evaluations. This article seeks to provide a comprehensive account of Letâ’ifü’l-Hikâyât by describing its manuscript copy, language, and orthographic features, by identifying the counterparts of Aesop’s stories in international indices, and by correcting the misinterpretations found in earlier scholarship.

Love, Duty and Sacrifice: The Letters of Pargalı İbrāḥīm to Muḥsine Hanım

Nilab Saeedi — 2025-10-23

This paper examines eleven letters exchanged between Grand Vizier İbrāḥīm Pasha and his wife Muḥsine Hanım. The collection consists of ten letters from İbrāḥīm and one from his wife. The examination unfolds across three themes: political reporting, emotional support, and separation. The argument is put forward that, while the content of the letters is personal, they also serve a broader purpose. İbrāḥīm likely uses these letters to apprise his wife of military victories and to communicate with a broader audience, reflecting his dual role as a statesman and family man. The analysis demonstrates how these letters assert political legitimacy while concurrently strengthening emotional bonds, thus revealing the complex intersection of power, faith, and personal devotion in the life of a high-ranking Ottoman statesman. By foregrounding the emotional side of a Grand Vizier, this article contributes to the history of emotions in the early modern Ottoman world and offers a rare analysis of epistolary material that blends personal devotion with political self-fashioning.

Evil in Nâzım Hikmet's Poems

Ürün Şen Sönmez — 2025-10-23

The aim of this study is to reveal that evil is a constitutive element in Nâzım Hikmet’s poetry, narrated with ideological awareness and contemporary philosophical basis. Though all his poems are covered by this study, only those in which evil plays a central role are analyzed. The concept of evil is examined in six interrelated themes: war, power, poverty, exploitation, the banality of evil and those who oppose it. The absence of natural evil in Nâzım Hikmet’s work is due to the materialist approach of Nâzım Hikmet, who believes that evil is caused by human action instead of fate or nature. As a communist poet, he defines the source of all evil as capitalism, imperialism and fascism, or closely connects it to these systems. Thus, the aim behind his presentation of evil in his poetry is twofold: to depict it realistically and to create an awakening that motivates action against it. It is also a resistance against oppressive systems. Further, in his poetry, evil is addressed in a holistic manner in which symbolic figures and events take a central place. This aspect increases the universality and timeless quality of his poetry.

Unheard Historical Sources: “Münşe’ât Mecmua”s

Nil Tekgül — 2025-10-23

Historians have long overlooked Ottoman münşe’ât compilations and often dismissed them for having limited historical value. This article argues that such collections—specifically Zübdetü’l-Münşe’ât, a manuscript copied in the nineteenth century—offer critical insights into Ottoman epistolary practices and can serve as valuable historical sources. While these works share significant formal and structural similarities, the vocabulary and expressions embedded in their style reflect the lived experiences of their time and offer important clues about prevailing emotional norms. Recent scholarship in the history of emotions has emphasized that emotions are not universal but are shaped by temporally and culturally specific norms. These findings are also supported by research in cognitive neuroscience and cultural psychology. A close reading of the epithets of the letters’ recipients, alongside their content, allows for analysis of both individual and social relationships, and reveals how contemporary societal transformations are reflected in epistolary forms. The study further demonstrates that “sincerity,” as a culturally constructed concept, underwent a notable transformation by the late 19th century. It also shows that the letters provide valuable perspectives on the destabilizing effects of delayed salary payments and the state’s bureaucratic responses, offer insight into familial dynamics and cultural practices, highlighting the historiographical potential of münşe’ât collections.

A Concise History of Turkish Republican Poetry: The Return of the Repressed

Yalçın Armağan — 2025-10-23

Turkish Republican Poetry borrowed two dominant trends from modern Ottoman poetry in the early 1920s: La Poésie pure and Syllabic Poetry. Although the defenders of “La Poésie pure,” of which Ahmet Haşim and Yahya Kemal were the most prominent representatives, and the poets who would be called the “Five Syllabists” were the dominant tendencies in poetry in the early Republic era, they would later lose their influence and Republican Poetry would move forward by adopting Nâzım Hikmet's “free verse” from 1929. Although Nâzım Hikmet's “free verse” was suppressed for political reasons at the time it was written, the Strange Trio (Garip) continued the “free verse” from 1937, emphasizing the world and language of the “little man”. After Strange Trio, the Second Renewal Movement (İkinci Yeni), which emerged in 1953-1954, met with resistance because it was based on an autonomous poetic language. In the 1960s, as a result of political developments in Turkey, while Nâzım Hikmet's banned poetry was republished and a socialist understanding became dominant in poetry, the Second Renewal was pushed to the periphery. In the 1980s, while socialist trend lost its central position, the books of Second Renewal started to circulate again and became canonical. Since the 1990s, there have been some struggles to overcome the “canonical” Second Renewal, and especially the “experimental poetry” has come to the fore. When we look at the century-long history of Turkish Republican Poetry, we see that Nâzım Hikmet and the Second Renewal Movement were suppressed at the time of their emergence, but in the following years they were re-circulated and created a wide sphere of influence. Nâzım Hikmet and the Second Renewal, in other words the return of the two “suppressed” poems, determined the history of Turkish Republican Poetry.

Writing in Red: Literature and Revolution across Turkey and the Soviet Union

Berfin Çiçek — 2025-10-23

In Writing in Red: Literature and Revolution across Turkey and the Soviet Union (2024), Nergis Ertürk examines the impact of Soviet artistic forms on Turkish literature during the 1920s, 1940s, and 1960s. She explores not only the works of prominent figures such as Nâzım Hikmet and Vâlâ Nureddin but also highlights the contributions of lesser-studied writers and artists like Suat Derviş and Abidin Dino, who engaged with Marxist literary aesthetics in Turkey. Ertürk closely reads the literary works and delves into the historical and political relationships between the Turkish Republic and the Soviet Union. While Ertürk provides a critical analysis through close engagement with the texts, she also situates the literary networks within their broader historical and political contexts. In this way, her book adopts an interdisciplinary approach to literary and cultural studies, combining the sociology of literature with historicization and close reading, treating narrative as a vital source for exploring cultural and political history.

Tanrısal Sessizlikte Yankılanan İnsan Sesi: Tevfik Fikret ve Modern Osmanlı Şiiri

Emrah Pelvanoğlu — 2025-10-23

This article reviews Deniz Aktan Küçük's The Human Voice Resonating in Divine Silence: Tevfik Fikret and Modern Ottoman Poetry (2023), a work that re-examines Tevfik Fikret's poetry beyond the formulaic explanations of modern Turkish literature and the teleological narratives of Ottoman modernization. The book's central inquiry is how different subjectivities—expressed through the lyrical voice or poetic persona—experience modernity as "history". Aktan Küçük’s approach deliberately moves beyond reducing the subject to Tevik Fikret’s biography or psychology. Instead, it adopts a close-reading method that inductively opens the poems to the historicity of subjectivity. The study maintains a productive tension: it simultaneously disengages the subject from determinist frameworks while universalizing it through philosophical debates on subjectivity and anchoring it within a "modern Ottoman" paradigm. In doing so, the book reframes Fikret's poetry as a site where crisis, transformation, and secular consciousness converge, offering insights into a world-historical moment that paved the way for the Turkish Republic.

Antikahramanın Biyografisi ve Türk Romanındaki Serüveni

Ayşe Sandıkkaya Aşır — 2025-10-23

Semra Yaman, in her 2025 work The Biography of the Antihero and Its Journey in the Turkish Novel, traces the figure of the antihero from mythological times onward. Although there is not yet a universally agreed-upon definition among theorists, the study examines the trajectory of the antihero—positioned as the counterpart of the hero and often characterized as ugly, unsuccessful, weak, untalented, cowardly, and unloved. After analyzing in detail the political, economic, and social conditions that prepared the ground for the emergence and development of the concept, Yaman offers an in-depth exploration of it from multiple perspectives. The study argues that the transformation of the individual as a result of modernism and modernization has undermined the traditional understanding of the hero, and that the antihero should be regarded as a product of this transformation. Beginning with myths and drawing on selected examples from world literature, Yaman identifies the features, development, and boundaries of the antihero before turning to examples from Turkish literature. In this context, twenty novels from the period between the Tanzimat era and 1950 are examined chronologically to demonstrate the emergence of the antihero in Turkish literature. Through close readings of fifteen novels from the period 1950–1980, the development of the antihero is then analyzed in a comprehensive manner.

Homo Mimeticus: A New Theory of Imitation

Dhrubajyoti Sarkar — 2025-10-23

This is a book review of Nidesh Lawtoo's 2022 book titled Homo Mimeticus: A New Theory of Imitation. In the book Latwoo offers a "re-turn" to the concept of mimessis by revisiting the Western philosophical traditions starting from Plato to Baudrillard. His key intervention is the introduction - if not excavation - of new ways of understanding mimesis in a world vastly changed from Plato's time. Some of the key concepts employed and created in this book are 'patho-logy', 'gendered mimesis', postcolonial mimesis' and viral mimesis. This is wide ranging book not only of interest to people within disciplinary boundaries of philosophy and arts, but anyone broadly interested in the history and shape of the human intellectual history.

Emotions in the Ottoman Empire: Politics, Society and Family in the Early Modern Era

Merve Döne Yıldırım — 2025-10-23

Nil Tekgül’s Emotions in the Ottoman Empire: Politics, Society and Family in the Early Modern Era (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023) explores the role of emotions in shaping the concepts of “protection” and “being protected” within the political, social, and familial contexts of early modern Ottoman society. Using court records as the primary source, emotions were conceptualised within the framework of moral virtues and vices through Kınalızâde Ali's work Ahlâk-ı Alâî and subjected to conceptual analysis. In this context, emotions such as shame, consent, mercy, and gratitude, which are read through actions and practices rather than internal processes, are examined within the framework of the ruler-ruled relationship, the relationships among the subjects themselves, and family relationships, where the concepts of protection and safeguarding are fundamental, in an attempt to express how these emotions were affected by modernisation movements. With the emergence of psychology as a modern science, emotions came to be regarded as internal processes, and the transformation processes brought about by modernisation movements also affected Ottoman society. In this regard, emotions, which became more rational due to the influence of modernisation movements in the political and social spheres, continued to play a complementary role in the family sphere.

Yazının Önünde: Edebî Metnin Anlamının Teşekkülünde Okurun Rolü

Nur Yılmaztürk Dağaslanı — 2025-10-23

The nature of one’s perspective on the literary text, the relationship between writing and speech, and the position of the reader in relation to the text are fundamental issues that extend from ancient poetic questions to modern theoretical debates. Atiye Gülfer Gündoğdu’s Yazının Önünde: Edebî Metnin Anlamının Teşekkülünde Okurun Rolü (Before the Text: The Role of the Reader in the Formation of Meaning in a Literary Work) reconsiders these questions along the axes of historical continuity and theoretical transformation, positioning the act of reading not merely as the production of meaning but as a ground for bearing witness to the emergence of meaning itself. The first chapter examines how the encounter with writing transforms the space of reading and understanding; the second explores the historical forms through which this transformation has taken shape since the late Ottoman period; and the third addresses the problem of the silencing of the text’s voice within modern modes of interpretation. Tracing the evolving relationship between the reader and the text throughout history, Gündoğdu argues that this encounter constitutes a formative experience that transforms the reader and shapes their life. Such an encounter requires the reader to allow the literary text to speak and to interpret it independently of the context in which it originally emerged. In this regard, the study engages critically with reader-response theories that gained prominence in the second half of the twentieth century, and through the hermeneutic thought of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, it repositions the possibilities for understanding the processes through which meaning takes shape in the literary text.

The Concept of Mimesis: History, Meaning, and Epistemic Context

Josef Früchtl — 2025-10-23

From Ancient Greece the concept of mimesis largely defines our understanding of art right up until the end of the eighteenth century, when it is drastically suppressed, until it re-emerges in the mid-twentieth century with a new focus, characterized not through philosophical aesthetics this time, but through the social and cultural sciences. Viewed historically and systematically, mimesis or imitation can be reconstructed as a concept which revolves around two poles, namely a world-reproducing and a world-creating pole, that fundamental aspect of art as a realistic mirror of nature, and art as its own, autonomous world. As imitation of action mimesis finally proves to be a primarily practical and social capacity.

Sanam: The Idol in Persian Vernacular Theories of Mimesis

Samuel Hodgkin — 2025-10-23

This essay introduces the process by which the Abrahamic polemical concept of the idol became a key term for Persian metapoetics and surveys the questions in poetics and narratology that writers and critics explored through the literary motif of the idol. The piece first establishes the Abrahamic and Islamic theological-hagiographic background for the rejection and destruction of idols; the Eastern Islamic milieu of religious diversity in the period from the eighth to the eleventh century CE that set the conditions for Persian poetic uses of the idol; and the contemporaneous Islamic philosophical reflections on Central and South Asian use of devotional images by Ibn Sīnā and al-Bīrūnī. It then considers a few case studies from the works of canonical poets from the tenth to the fifteenth century CE: Firdawsi, Unsuri, Nizami, Sadi, and Jami. Lastly, the piece briefly considers some partial parallels with the Petrarchan literary use of the figure of the idol.

Literature of Knowledge and Literature of Power

Thomas De Quincey — 2025-10-23

This writing is the Turkish translation of the paragraphs about literature of knowledge and literature of power the English writer Thomas De Quincey penned in the “Alexander Pope” chapter of his book Essays on the Poets and Other English Writers (Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1853). In this part of his essay, Thomas De Quincey, through a critical lens, puts forth his ideas relating to the concept of literature, the ties between literature and books, the existence of two different genres of writing within literature that can be conceptualized as literature of knowledge and literature of power, the functional and methodical differences between these genres, the distinction between knowledge in the books and truth, power as a concept beyond truth, literature’s role of keeping human emotions alive, literature of power’s appealing to understanding heart rather than to mere understanding, the poetic justice, the superiority of the author of literature that moves over the author of literature that teaches, the transitory nature of the works of literature of knowledge as opposed to the permanency of the works of literature of power, and the significance of the matchlessness of beautiful human art works.