The Letters – Levent Korkmaz

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文The Letters

Classical literature and the study of language: theatre, romanticism, philology, the fantastic.

The Classical Page

Greek and Latin letters, the stage

Classical Literature (Greek and Latin)
Greek and Latin poets, historians and mythographers used as witnesses: Ovid, Horace, Livy, Lucian, Longus, Conon, Pausanias, Pseudo-Apollodorus.
Theatre & Dramatic Tradition
Aeschylus to Beckett — the oldest narrative art form.
1. Musical Theatre
  Lin-Manuel Miranda; the sung drama as a vessel of popular wisdom.
2. Philosophical and Metaphysical Drama
Attic Tragedy
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides: the contest of layers, blood-debt, and the god from the machine.
Fable and Wisdom Literature
Hyginus's Fabulae, Ibn al-Muqaffa's Kalila wa Dimna, La Fontaine: the short tale that carries a maxim.

The Romantic Turn

imagination against mechanism

Metaphysical Poets
Seventeenth-century English poets of the extended conceit (Donne's twin compasses).
Romanticism
Counter-revolution to mechanism — the recovery of imagination, the sublime, organic form.
Fantasy & Mythic
Carroll, Tolkien, Le Guin, Rowling — the recovery of enchantment.
English Romantic and Augustan Poetry
Gray's Elegy and the Eton ode, Keats's negative capability, Milton.

The Tongues

philology and the science of language

Oriental Studies (Islamic and Persian Philology)
European scholarship on Arabic, Persian and Turkish languages, literatures and religion from the late eighteenth century.
Historical and Comparative Linguistics
Genealogical and areal study of languages: Schleicher's Stammbaum (1853), Schmidt's wave theory (1872), Schuchardt's mixed languages (1884), Kopitar on the Balkans (1829), Jespersen on origins.
Structuralism / Semiotics
Saussure's langue/parole and the sign; the Prague and Paris schools; Greimas's structural semantics and the semiotic square (1966, with Rastier 1968).
1. Post-structuralism / Postmodernism
  The French turn after structuralism: Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, Baudrillard.
2. Sociolinguistics and Dialogue Studies
  Study of language variation and conversational alignment: discourse LIKE and quotatives (D'Arcy, Tagliamonte, Buchstaller), accommodation theory (Giles), interactive alignment in dialogue (Pickering and Garrod).
3. Cognitive Linguistics and Analogy
  Conceptual metaphor, image schemas, blending and structure-mapping theories of analogy (Lakoff and Johnson, Fauconnier and Turner, Gentner, Holyoak and Gick, Hofstadter; Daugman on brain metaphors).
4. Generative and Dependency Linguistics
  Chomsky's generative grammar, Tesniere's dependency grammar, Fillmore's frames, Mel'cuk's Meaning-Text Theory, Kennedy and McNally on scales.
Cognitive Anthropology / Linguistic Relativity
Boas, Sapir and Whorf on language shaping thought; Sapir's grading (1944); Berlin and Kay's evolutionary order of basic colour terms (1969).
Classical Philology
The scholarly study of Greek and Latin language, texts and history, including Greek etymology.

The Anatolian Shelf

Ottoman letters and their decline

Ottoman Letters and Travel Writing
Ottoman prose literature, chronicles and travel accounts, above all Evliya Çelebi's Seyahatname.
Anatolian-Ottoman Decline Literature
Genre of Ottoman intellectual writing diagnosing the decline of the empire and prescribing reform from inside the polity.
History of Empires: Ottoman Empire