The Stranger's Voice: Integrated Literary Cultures in Anatolia and the Premodern World.

Abstract

This dissertation intervenes in debates within Comparative Literature on the connectivity between premodern literary cultures. In particular, it focuses on the migration of a single loan-word, the gharib, meaning stranger or foreigner, across Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Armenian literatures in Anatolia during the 13th-15th centuries. I treat the ubiquitous gharib, which cuts across Islamic, Christian, and Jewish texts during this period, as a potent figure for rethinking what is fundamentally non-native and even ???cosmopolitan??? about premodern literary production itself. Therefore, in telling the story of the ever-wandering stranger, this study seeks to shed light on a much larger question: how and why literary conventions traveled beyond the orbit of any single language before our own globally interconnected age. Chapter one explores how Jalal al-Din Rumi shaped his multi-religious community through translocally competitive, yet locally resonant, literary figures and conventions, including the gharib. Chapter two looks at how some of the earliest authors of literary Turkish in Anatolia, such as Soltan Valad, Yunus Emre, and Asik Pasa adopted similar communicative strategies, allowing them to legitimize Turkish as a literary language by dynamically appropriating and adapting preexisting literary models, forms, and figures. Similarly, chapter three examines how authors of an emerging Middle Armenian poetry, such as Frik and Mkrtich??? Naghash, likewise reinterpreted widely resonant literary forms and figures, including the gharib, through an explicitly Christian framework in order to better engage with their own audiences. Chapter four frames the omnivorously adaptive modes of ???Anatolian??? literary production alongside similar processes happening in Europe and South Asia, thereby proposing an alternative way of understanding the relationships between literary cultures beyond the traditional models of cosmopolitan and vernacular languages. Unlike many frameworks which analyze the 'diffusion' of World Literature, my methodological approach eschews models of exchange across literary languages as a linear, unidirectional process, whereby a 'stronger' cultural formation influences a supposedly 'weaker' one. Instead, my treatment of the peregrinations of the gharib offers a non-hierarchical, multidirectional model for understanding how literatures develop in alongside, in concert with, and in opposition to one another across vast geographic spaces.