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Metis Nonfiction
Literary / Cultural Criticism
13 x 19.5 cm, 248 pp
ISBN No. 975-342-489-2
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Prints:
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1st Print: March 2004
2nd Print: April 2007
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Download high resolution copy
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About the Author
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One of the foremost cultural critics in Turkey, Nurdan Gürbilek is the author of
Vitrinde
Yaşamak (Life in the Shopwindow, 1992), an analysis of the cultural
dynamics of the 1980s in Turkey. Her other publications include Yer Değiştiren Gölge
(Shifting Shadow, 1995) and Ev Ödevi (Homework, 1999), collection of essays
on modern Turkish writers. She is also the author of
Kötü Çocuk Türk (Bad Boy Turk, 2001), an analysis of some of the
significant images and tropes in modern Turkish literature and popular culture.
In her last book Kör Ayna, Kayıp Şark (Orient Lost, 2004) Gürbilek explores
the sexual anxieties accompanying the Ottoman-Turkish literary modernization. Nurdan
Gürbilek also edited, translated and introduced Son Bakışta Aşk (Love at
Last Sight, 1993), a collection of essays in Turkish by Walter Benjamin. She is
currently working on a book on Dostoyevsky’s "underground tragedy" and its counterparts
in modern Turkish literature.
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Other Books from Metis
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Vitrinde Yaşamak (Life in the Shopwindow), 1992
Yer Değiştiren Gölge (Shifting Shadow), 1995
Ev Ödevi (Homework), 1999
Kötü Çocuk
Türk (Bad Boy Turk), 2001
Mağdurun
Dili (Language of the Downtrodden), 2008
(Language of the Downtrodden), 2008
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Nurdan Gürbilek
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Orient Lost
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Literature and Anxiety
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Kör Ayna, Kayıp Şark
Edebiyat ve Endişe
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Contents
Reviews
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A collection of essays on the anxieties accompanying the traumatic birth of the
modern Ottoman-Turkish novel. Here Nurdan Gürbilek explores the sexual anxieties
accompanying the Ottoman-Turkish literary modernization; the anxiety of effeminization
and castration, the anxiety of losing virility and forever being locked up in childhood.
Gürbilek starts her discussion by focusing
on the gender aspect of the new "writer-reader contract" that guides the modern
Ottoman-Turkish writer. The first essay "Male Writer, Female Reader" discusses how
the Ottoman-Turkish novelists imagined the "reader" as basically female – emotional,
erratic, prone to bad influence, an easy prey for the modern West, while imagining
the "writer" as the male who aptly refuses to being seduced by foreign ideals, someone
who influences rather than being influenced. The abundance of female readers in
the early novels, says Gürbilek, are part of the novelist’s projective endeavor
to cope with his own anxiety of influence which is always experienced as an anxiety
of effeminization. The next essay "Anxiety of Effeminization" discusses the figure
of the Ottoman-Turkish dandy not only as someone extremely influenced by the West,
but also as a hybrid sexual figure, as an effeminate man, a castrated boy, a hybrid
female-male, an infantile man devoid of virility and an effeminate reader having
neither a national integrity nor an integral sexual self of its own.
The relationship between the East and
the West was generally imagined by the Ottoman-Turkish writers with the metaphor
of seduction or marriage. The third essay in the collection "Gender of the East"
discusses the radical transformations of the concept of the "East" in the Ottoman-Turkish
imagination. Why was East imagined as a powerful conqueror by the first generation
Tanzimat writers, but then as an old slave to lust by the next generation and how
did it gradually become a mystical mother, a fecund female, the mother Orient for
the later writers? Why was Europe sometimes imagined as a virgin silently waiting
to be conquered and sometimes as a seductive but unattainable whore and sometimes
as the young conqueror himself? Guided by these questions Gürbilek explains how
not only West but East itself is reconstructed by Turkish writers with the national-sexual
anxieties accompanying modernization. The fourth essay "Permanent Childhood" is
a discussion on narcissistic injury and the Turkish novelist’s obsession with the
mirror. And the last essay in the collection, "Literature of Child Nations" taking
as its point of departure Fredric Jameson’s much debated "national allegory" theory
on the Third World novel discusses with utmost care some of the traps of theories
dedicating themselves to cultural difference.
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Introduction
Male Writer, Female Reader
Anxiety of Effeminization
Gender of the East
Permanent Childhood
Literature of Child Nations
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Jale Özata Dirlikyapan, Kanat, Fall 2004
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"In Orient Lost Nurdan Gürbilek once again offers crucial analyses and initiates
new discussions. She approaches literary texts on the basis of the anxiety caused
by dualisms such as individual/social, self/other or authenticity/imitation, and
carves out a criteria for assessing value. Here too, Gürbilek is working not around
literary texts but right from within them."
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Fatih Özgüven, Virgül, January 2005
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"Nurdan Gürbilek’s collection of essays –actually a perfect structure made up of
writings that come out of one another– suggests, at least initially, that there
is a sort of transvestism of literature. When we consider the observation that we
can read literature as a masquerade, a disguise, and the fact that the focus here
is 19th century Istanbul, we realize that the issue at hand is not only the work
of the novelist and novel-writing but also modernization and Westernization. Thus
‘events unfold’… (Here I should say that Orient Lost achieves something rare
for a book of its kind, it is as thrilling and captivating as a mystery novel.)"
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