Please join the Affect and the Emotions Workshop, remotely, on
Monday, November 8th
when
Isabel Lachenauer
PhD Candidate, Ottoman and Turkish Studies, NELC
presents her paper:
“Through the Looking Glass: Mirror Characters as Windows into the Emotional Community ofʿĀrifʿAlī”
Discussant: Jane Gordon, PhD Student, Assyriology, NELC
the event will take place on Zoom at
4:30-6:00pm CT
Description: This second chapter of my dissertation, “Artūḫı Wept: Reading Emotions in ʿĀrif ʿAlī’sDānişmendnāme,” looks at never-before studied poems in the fourteenth-century Old Anatolian Turkish redaction of the popular epicDānişmendnāmeto reveal how its author employed novel and sophisticated literary devices to sway his audience’s emotions in certain ways at “appropriate” times. I argue that the principal way ʿĀrif ʿAlī accomplished this was through mirror characters, literary devices which serve as “go-betweens” between text and audience by demonstrating and appealing to the emotions the audience should be feeling and when. Drawing on the theories of Barbara Rosenwein and Frank Brandsma, I argue that analyzing mirror characters like the warrior Artūḫı bridges author, text, and audience, thus bringing us closer to my project’s aim of illuminating the elusive redactor ʿĀrif ʿAlī’s emotional community.
The paper, to be read in advance, is available on a protected post on our website, with the password “mirror.”
