Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey

The 1928 Turkish alphabet reform replacing the Perso-Arabic script with the Latin phonetic alphabet is an emblem of Turkish modernization. Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey traces the history of Turkish alphabet and language reform from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, examining its effects on modern Turkish literature. In readings of the novels, essays, and poetry of Ahmed Midhat, Recâizade Ekrem, Ömer Seyfeddin, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, Peyami Safa, and Nâzim Hikmet, Nergis Ertürk argues that modern Turkish literature is profoundly self-conscious of dramatic change in its own historical conditions of possibility. Where literary historiography has sometimes idealized the Turkish language reforms as the culmination of a successful project of Westernizing modernization, Ertürk suggest a different critical narrative: one of the consolidation of control over communication, forging a unitary nation and language from a pluralistic and multilingual society.