Specters and Circulation of Meaning: Edebiyat-ı Cedide on Modern Literary Language

While the Ottoman Empire was not subject to European colonization, nevertheless it experienced the type of assimilation of non-European languages and literatures that Aamir Mufti understands as Orientalism that functioned as a "colonization of the linguistic outside."¹ Such processes of assimilation coincided with linguistic modernization as a project of comparison because societies outside of Euro-America have been forced to "live lives comparatively by virtue of experiencing some form of colonization or subjection enforced by the specter of imperialism."² Indeed, nineteenth-century Ottoman intellectuals and writers adapted some of the linguistic and literary norms to make them correspond to European expectations and criteria for evaluation, a process described in a dif erent context as "global relations of force."³ In this way, Ottoman Turkish must be understood as haunted by the European other because its relationship with Europe is one of comparison in which Europe functions as a referent of superiority. This Europe, as Rey Chow asserts, is "always already present."⁴ But we must also take into account that Ottoman Turkish is haunted from within by Arabic and Persian as intimate others that, beginning in the Tanzimat era, were represented as belonging to the past. It is this double haunting that marks late Ottoman Turkish modernity.

Within the history of linguistic modernization, the avant-garde literary movement Edebiyat-ı Cedide ("New Literature," 1896–1901) stands out,⁵ yet it is rarely understood beyond Eurocentric paradigms of European influence.⁶ But these paradigms occlude tensions at work in the complex processes of linguistic and literary modernization at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Edebiyat-ı Cedide forms a moment of intensified transaction with European languages and literatures that nevertheless insists on the presence of suppressed aspects of the Ottoman language. Like the Tanzimat literary period ("Reorganization," 1860–96) that preceded it,⁷ Edebiyat-ı Cedide is part of late Ottoman cultural history and the impetus to modernize literary form and language. While Tanzimat literature attempted to harmonize European forms with Ottoman-Turkish sensibilities, Edebiyat-ı Cedide aimed at breaking free from Ottoman tradition and Islamic epistemology in its attempt to articulate an alternative modernity. However, even as Edebiyat-ı Cedide attempts to break free from Ottoman tradition, aspects of the suppressed past emerge in their writing, producing an uncanny ef ect, a tension that is a central aspect of Edebiyat-ı Cedide writing.

Numerous critical articles and essays on language, particularly by the prominent voices of the movement, poet Tevfik Fikret (1867–1915) and novelist Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil (1866–1945), published in Servet-i fünun, created a forum for Edebiyat-ı Cedide writers to come to terms with late Ottoman Turkish modernity and its implications. As outlined in their articles, the Edebiyat-ı Cedide vision of literary language defied the nineteenth-century prevailing trends toward simplification and vernacularization of Ottoman Turkish that was intended to subvert and supplant the traditional "high" Ottoman literary language. As glimpsed in Tevfik Fikret's and Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil's arguments for a modern language, a core concern of the group was how to navigate processes of assimilation as translation, in the broad sense of the historical processes of the circulation of meaning between languages, that negotiates not only Europe as the linguistic outside but Arabic and Persian from within. By tracing the ways in which Edebiyat-ı Cedide forged modern literary language, this article probes the question of how Edebiyat-ı Cedide positions itself within modernity in an earlier moment of global modernization.

Suppressing Intimate Linguistic Others

Since Edebiyat-ı Cedide responded to and challenged Ottoman projects of linguistic modernization initiated in the nineteenth century, the movement must be understood as fully engaged in them and thus best comprehended within the broader history of the Ottoman language. Nineteenth-century Ottoman projects of linguistic modernization emerged from the simultaneous intensification of communications and the rise of an Ottoman Turkish journalistic movement.⁸ The earliest stage of simplification began in the eighteenth century in the form of lexicographic and grammatical movements and translations of Islamic texts in order to facilitate state communication. But it was decisively the journalistic...