Comparing Non-European Literatures - Dances of Mori Ogai's The Dancing Princess and Sabahattin Ali's Madonna in a Fur Coat to the Music of Goethe

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Güven D. Ç.

SELCUK UNIVERSITESI EDEBIYAT FAKULTESI DERGISI-SELCUK UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF FACULTY OF LETTERS, cilt.45, ss.81-100, 2021 (ESCI) identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 45
  • Basım Tarihi: 2021
  • Dergi Adı: SELCUK UNIVERSITESI EDEBIYAT FAKULTESI DERGISI-SELCUK UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF FACULTY OF LETTERS
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), Central & Eastern European Academic Source (CEEAS), MLA - Modern Language Association Database, Directory of Open Access Journals
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.81-100
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: Comparative literature, modern Turkish literature, modern Japanese literature, woman studies, translation
  • Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

Comparative literature explores the influences of older "texts" on newer ones, through a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, and multilingual perspective. Another common practice of comparative analysis is to study how Euro-American literary texts inspire non-European ones, and vice versa. Yet, there is a methodological gap concerning the comparative studies that focus on non-European texts with no "direct" intertextual connection. On this basis, arguably, one of the most intriguing and creative ways of comparing two or more non-European works is to spot their common source texts. It is certainly not the only method of comparing non-Western texts, but it is indubitably an efficient method for positivistic intertextual analysis. This article aims to present a "case study" that may serve as a model for comparing non-European literatures. To this end, we focused on two works from Turkish and Japanese literatures that share remarkable resemblances, yet that do not have direct intertextual bonds: Mori Ogai's The Dancing Princess （『舞姫』）and Sabahattin Ali's Madonna in a Fur Coat (Kürk Mantolu Madonna). As the major common source text that both refer to is Goethe's Faust, we traced how these two similar non-European works are affected by Faust, and how their intertextual dances with Faust contributed to their national and international literary reputations.