E. Khayyat's Istanbul 1940 and Global Modernity focuses on three authors, Erich Auerbach (1892–1957), Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–1962), and Halide Edib (1884–1964), who all taught at Istanbul University in the 1940s. Khayyat demonstrates that their works provide “three different yet analogous accounts of the one and the same world historical moment drafted at the same time, in the same place” (p. xii). By contextualizing Auerbach, Tanpınar, and Edib within this moment, Khayyat successfully reorients both the fields of modern Turkish literature and comparative literature toward new directions.
The book consists of three parts, each dedicated to one author. At the same time, Istanbul 1940 provides a coherent account of these authors’ shared vision of global modernity, as Khayyat makes constant comparisons among them. Thus, he demonstrates that the cultural and political shifts that Turkey experienced within the first half of the 20th century cannot be studied apart from similar shifts that Europe underwent in the same period. Auerbach, Tanpınar, and Edib became disenchanted with the optimistic vision of progress and modernity that has characterized the 19th and early 20th centuries. This vision culminated in horrendous social and political practices such as the rise of fascism in Europe and modernization movements that suppressed traditional practices in non-Western societies. As a response, these authors chartered the histories of their cultures for ultimately critiquing the globalizing world in which they lived.
It is easy to assume that Auerbach's works are Eurocentric because Auerbach did not know Turkish and his work, Mimesis, does not discuss literatures emerging from the Muslim world. However, Khayyat demonstrates that Auerbach often gestured toward the non-Western world in his writings. He then argues that critics can reassess his works within a collective effort in which Tanpınar and Edib participated. This new reading of Auerbach undermines some of the scholarship in the discipline of comparative literature that often endows him with a sense of exceptionalism and studies him as a founding figure whose works laid the ground for the discipline's key concepts such as exile and worldliness. In Istanbul 1940, Khayyat establishes that Auerbach's Turkish colleagues, Tanpınar and Edib, also wrote works that engaged with foundational issues of comparative literature. Likewise, Auerbach's exile in Istanbul was not a peculiar phenomenon. His colleagues shared a similar disposition with him toward their society and the world. Both Edib and Tanpınar had an astute understanding and appreciation of Ottoman heritage and they were thus marginalized in their modernizing society that belittled this legacy.
Khayyat's analysis will also encourage the field of modern Turkish literature to move beyond its typical interpretations of the tension between tradition and modernity. Furthermore, Istanbul 1940 covers issues in which the field has shown little interest such as the representations of South Asia in Turkish texts. The section on Tanpınar demonstrates how Tanpınar reflected on a rich, multilingual, and ambiguous heritage of pre-modern Islamic culture as he witnessed the nationalist climate dismissing the complexity of this heritage to forge a crystal-clear myth of national origins. Khayyat gives a creative and convincing interpretation of Tanpınar's famous novel, The Time Regulation Institute (Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü; 1954). Khayyat argues that this novel may be read as the second volume of Tanpınar's The History of Nineteenth-Century Turkish Literature (On Dokuzuncu Asır Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi; 1949), since the novel captures the cultural transformations that occurred after the demise of the Ottoman Empire, how “the silent ‘poetry’ of the nineteenth-century revolutionary thought was overcome by the forcible and ‘explicative’ mood of historical and social sciences in Tanpınar's day and age” (p. 131).
The section on Edib demonstrates that India, which received almost no attention in the writings of Auerbach and Tanpınar, plays a key role in her thought: “[Edib's] transhistorical and cross-cultural, ‘comparative’ perspective was more extensive than Auerbach's and Tanpınar's combined” (p. 167). And yet, this perspective becomes enabled through new cultural dynamics in which the global English gains ascendancy in the mid-20th century. The “Afterword: The Newcomer” section provides a brief analysis of various works from Orhan Pamuk (b. 1952). Khayyat interprets them not as windows into Turkish culture—the prevalent reading in the world literature scholarship—but rather as particular responses toward Tanpınar. Pamuk builds upon Tanpınar in certain ways; however, unlike Tanpınar, Pamuk does not consider Turkey's belated modernity a perpetual burden and sometimes even celebrates it.
Critics who expect a more conventional book of world literature that charters intertextual relations and translations among different languages will not find what they are looking for in Khayyat's work. Because none of the three authors cite each other, Khayyat undertakes what he calls an “imaginative approach” and maps out the similar worldviews of these authors (p. xii). His work opens ways in which scholars can reassess literary traditions that do not engage in contact with each other through translation or intertextuality. In fact, as literary studies reorients itself more toward methods such as digital humanities, Istanbul 1940 provides a timely reminder of the skepticism that authors like Tanpınar and Auerbach shared toward positivist approaches. These authors believed that the discipline of history partitions the past into distinct time periods and contributes to the discourse of modernization that they critiqued. For these writers, the study of literature, unlike the discipline of history, values the figural and the contingent. For example, critics can randomly choose a few passages from a text and give a close reading of them to attain larger insights. Understanding the global context in which this particular investment in close reading took shape in the 1940s can provide new directions for the future of comparative literature.
While Khayyat engages with the latest debates in world literature, his work will also please specialists of modern Turkish literature. Istanbul 1940 displays philological rigor, as it uses a wide range of sources from different languages, such as German, French, and Turkish (both modern and Ottoman). Furthermore, the book provides fresh perspectives on early Republic writings from Tanpınar and Edib through examining late Ottoman works from authors such as Ziya Pasha (1825–1880) and Ahmet Midhat Efendi (1844–1912).
Khayyat himself notes that he “at times sacrific[es] direct engagement with the broader scholarship that informed the perspectives developed in [his] book” (p. xxx). Thus, Istanbul 1940 is not mired in lengthy debates that have shaped the secondary literature. At the same time, because the book addresses several disciplines at once, specialists may wish to familiarize themselves with the earlier scholarship on the three authors to truly appreciate what Khayyat's work achieves. For example, specialists of Middle Eastern literatures may consider reading works from Emily Apter, Edward Said, Aamir Mufti, and Kader Konuk on Auerbach. Critics who do not specialize in modern Turkish literature will be pleased to discover recent works from scholars such as Nergis Ertürk and Özen Nergis Dolcerocca who provide nuanced interpretations of Tanpınar's works within a comparative frame.
Like any work, Istanbul 1940 may not please critics who have different methodological inclinations. Although the book provides some information on Istanbul University in the first few pages, some readers may seek a more detailed description of the curriculum and institutional structure of the university. The first half of the work's title, Istanbul 1940, also suggests that the book will provide more information on the political and economic shifts that shaped Istanbul in the 1940s and its relationship with global modernity. The work, however, does not provide such a contextualization. What Khayyat sacrifices by not covering this material is more than made up for by a deep dive into the intellectual world of the three authors. Finally, while I understand and appreciate Khayyat's focus on Istanbul, it would be worthwhile to undertake a more comprehensive comparative project that examines whether the vision of global modernity that his book describes was peculiar only to authors in Istanbul or rather shared by authors from different parts of the world.
While Khayyat could have explored these complex and vast topics, other historians and literary critics can take these topics as points of departure for further avenues of research that Istanbul 1940 opens up. Overall, Khayyat's work provides deep insights and exciting approaches for Middle Eastern studies and comparative literature, as it generates a rich intellectual panorama of three writers who worked in Istanbul during the same period. Just as Edib, Auerbach, and Tanpınar looked at their pasts to respond to their globalizing present, critics today who read Khayyat's work can look at these three authors to respond to a globalizing literary studies.
