Minorities in/of Lit

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course will be a comparative approach to the minorities of Ottoman-Turkish and Habsburg-Austrian contexts, starting from late nineteenth century extending to late twentieth century. It aims to analyze how minorities are represented in canonical texts as well as how minorities write back to hegemonic powers. Similar developments in Ottoman-Turkish history and Habsburg-Austrian history make a comparative approach a potentially productive tool to explore further into the transition from late empires into nation-states in the twentieth century. Main focus will be Armenian, Jewish, Kurdish, and Greek representations in the Ottoman-Turkish case, and Jewish and Slav representations in the Habsburg-Austrian case. The course attempts to understand the place of minorities within nation state identities and programmes and how literature represents, and expresses this struggle. Questions asked in the course include - but are not limited to: what does it mean to have a minority voice in literature? How is such a literature different from majority texts? To what extent are the minorities in this course publically recognized, and how far are they crypto identities? How does gender and class further inflect the status of the minority writer?