Lady Mary, Celebi, and the Ottoman Empire (part 2)

While I'm online, I thought I'd post a little bit of information about Lady Mary Wortley Montague and Evliya Celebi, our authors.  The picture above is Lady Mary in "Turkish costume."  I found it at the University of North Texas' exhibit on women writers.  This exhibit also included the following concise biography of Lady Mary:

http://www.library.unt.edu/rarebooks/exhibits/women/17th.htm#Lady%20Mary%20Wortley%20Montagu

This picture of a cover of a recent biography is probably a little more colorful!  Lady Mary, by the way, is particularly known for her early adoption of immunization.


Luminarium.org's biography is more extensive than the University of North Texas'.

http://www.luminarium.org/eightlit/montagu/marybio.htm

This site also has links to Lady Mary's works in various genres:

http://www.luminarium.org/eightlit/montagu/marybib.htm

Britain's Twickenham Museum also has information about Lady Mary in the context of her relationship with Alexander Pope:

http://www.twickenham-museum.org.uk/detail.asp?ContentID=180

For a little more information about Pope, here is the same museum's page on him:

http://www.twickenham-museum.org.uk/detail.asp?ContentID=19

Below is a picture of the Ottoman author Evliya Celebi:

Here is a link to a biography of Celebi:

http://www.mymerhaba.com/Evliya-%C3%87elebi-Traveler-in-Turkey-138.html

Among the places that Celebi visited was Gjirokastra, Albania:

http://www.gjirokastra.org/sub_links/help_save/help_visit_evliya_celebi.html

Turkey's Ministry of Culture and Tourism has posted Celebi's description of Van Castle in the city of Van:

http://www.kultur.gov.tr/EN/BelgeGoster.aspx?17A16AE30572D313E603BF9486D4371D58DCB41B038C3F0E



Here is more information about Celebi's travels and his writing:

http://www.sabanciuniv.edu/ssbf/evliyacelebi/eng/?rota/rota.html

http://www.kent.ac.uk/english/evliya/seyahatname.html

Aphra Behn's Oroonoko

We may read selections from Aphra Behn's Oroonoko alongside the excerpts from Olaudah Equiano's and possibly Harriet Jacobs' slave narratives.  Oroonoko, however, was a novel (that may or may not have been autobiographical) written about 100 years before Equiano's time and over 150 years before Jacobs'.  Some scholars argue that Oroonoko even predates the novel.  Others argue that the protagonist's royal blood was much more important to the author than his race was and that she was using this story to comment on the then-current political situation in England.  (In November of the year that Oroonoko was published, James II fled from England and was deposed.  The new king was his Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange.)

In this novel, Aphra Behn, a novelist/playwright/political pamphleteer *and* one of the first professional women writers in England, tells the story of her friendship with Oroonoko, an African of royal blood who is kidnapped into slavery and ultimately rebels against the Europeans.  Oroonoko is unsuccessful and is then executed.

The picture above is from Thomas Southerne's successful play that was based on Behn's novel.  In this play, Oroonoko's wife is depicted as a European.  Behn, however, depicted this woman as a dark-skinned African. 

For more background about Oroonoko, see these sites:

http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng211/aphra_behn_oroonoko.htm

http://www.wmich.edu/dialogues/texts/oroonoko.html

http://www.english.bham.ac.uk/staff/tom/website/work99/bp3/Behn/essay/essay1.html

http://www.litkicks.com/Oroonoko/

As you can see, it is controversial whether or not Oroonoko is a novel--and how autobiographical it was. 

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/11/aphra_behn_still_a_radical_exa.html

For more information about Behn and her career, see these sites:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/behn_aphra.shtml

http://www.lit-arts.net/Behn/chron-ab.htm

http://www.luminarium.org/eightlit/behn/behnbio.htm

For links to her works (poems, plays, & novels), see this site at Luminarium:

http://www.luminarium.org/eightlit/behn/behnbib.htm

I've enjoyed reading her play The Rover!  Hellena in this play is a feisty girl. 

Siddhartha

First of all, I want to welcome the new members to this blog. Thanks for signing up early. I've been writing these blog entries to get myself ready for the fall semester, but even so it's good to have an audience. Moreover, since EN 201 can be an intense course, getting a head start is a wise idea, no matter how you do it.

In this entry, I want to talk a little bit about Siddhartha, one of our extra readings (along with the Penelopiad). Don't worry; the image above is not the edition I expect you to buy. I just liked the cover, and I couldn't find an image of the edition I have.

Like Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, Herman Hesse's Siddhartha is a modern response to an ancient story. Set in India at the time of Buddhism's beginnings, Siddhartha tells the story of a man's search for self-actualization through Hindu mysticism, Buddhism, physical love (with Kamala), parenting, companionship, and nature. Siddhartha is contrasted with his boyhood friend, Govinda who becomes a Buddhist monk. A work written by a 20th-century European, Siddhartha also fits into our concept of world literature as a way of reading. Hesse's book complements Atwood's nicely, and this pairing is necessary because after all EN 201 is a course in world literature, not just western literature. As we will see this semester, Hinduism & Buddhism have influenced authors and readers just as classical mythology and literature *and* Christianity have. It will be interesting to read Siddhartha alongside the excerpts from the Ramayana and the Maharabhata (or even Peter Brook's video) as well as the Tale of Genji. There Murasaki often expresses a wish to become a Buddhist nun, particularly once she is in her thirties.

Yet both Hesse and Atwood are writing outside India and Ancient Greece, respectively. To what extent can either author write about these cultures? Consider, too, that Atwood is a feminist and that as a novelist, she is writing in a tradition that, for so many ways, has opposed itself to the epic. Hesse himself had been to India, but it appears from the introduction in my edition that his visit there had been very frustrating. (Keep in mind that he was writing in the early twentieth century, a time before the days of easy jet travel or even any jet travel. One might travel to the other side of the world as Hesse did or as anthropologist Margaret Mead did, but it was a long & involved process. Often a trip to another part of the world was a once-in-a-lifetime event.)

Additionally, as a questing hero, Siddhartha complements Odysseus, Job, and Gilgamesh, to name three whom we will encounter. It's true that Hesse's book is *not* an epic, even a literary version of an epic, but like Odysseus or Gilgamesh, Siddhartha is involved in a quest, and, like Job, his story is a very spiritual one. (But, as we often say with Job's story or Dante's Divine Comedy, can we say that Hesse intended Siddhartha's story to be of cosmic importance? I suspect that he felt that this story was very relevant to himself and his times--Europe after WWI, though.)

This, of course, brings up the question why each author, Hesse in particular, decided to "go outside of his culture's 'tradition.'" And this question, in turn, leads to a term called "orientalism." Scholar and critic Edward Said popularized this term in the 1970s, and, strictly speaking, it refers to 19th & 20th century British, French, and American representations of the Middle East (or what was once called "the Orient") as an exotic Other in opposition to the "normative" West. However, even though EN 201 focuses on earlier works, many written at a time when the West was *not* politically or culturally dominant, we still need to be concerned about how we read this earlier literature. After all, for example, literature occupied a different role in each culture and was defined differently. The Tale of Genji was written in Japanese, a language that, for the elite of Murasaki Shikibu's time, was a woman's language. Men read and wrote Chinese. Homer's epics began as tales told aloud to an audience. And, to return to English literature, at a time not too far from when EN 201 ends & EN 202 begins, literature included history but not novels. Novels were regarded as throwaway reading. Although the playhouse was a place where all levels of (London) society met, the manuscripts of the plays performed there were not allowed into the Bodleian Library. So it's important to recognize that as twenty-first century readers, we are reading examples of world literature differently from the way that their authors expected them to be read--or heard.

With that, I'll close. Take care.