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is the same as the author’s implied or ideal reader. Moreover, the target readership is circumscribed in each case by the language in question, to which translations add a further dimension. In all cases, the mode of addressing the audience or its narratee positions is vital for the “radical impulse” which literary analysis may at least sometimes discern in the fictional works, as their society’s imaginary. Wherever we have found statements concerning the intended or empirical reading community, we have included the information mainly in footnotes.

For works representing conditions in honor-based communities or circumscribed by face norms, an empowering or transformative impulse would be relevant especially for empirical readers within such communities, including Eco’s concrete subjects of acts of textual cooperation (90) – though these may possibly not be the majority reading group. We are not suggesting, however, that members of families directly affected by honor-based violence are likely to be among the readers. At the same time we remain aware that, for interpretive tasks, it is not easy to identify difference regarding regional in relation to transnational or even global audiences, and that positing imaginary social unities for reading formations can be fallacious (see for instance Benwell et al.). The people who “look for the measure of reality in your work” come from different cultural environments. As they seek to exercise individual and collective agency, readerships form communities with porous boundaries, while they may become the targets of an alterity industry (Huggan 423–24). Whether consciously or less consciously, values as well as socio-ethical concepts are (re-)defined while interacting with a literary text in various ways, both on the writer’s and the reader’s side across cultural boundaries.²⁸ Psychological research ←19 | 20→confirms that readers show effects of stories on their real-world beliefs and conduct.²⁹

A rethinking of what seem to be ingrained sets of values may not be wholly unrealistic,³⁰ if reading groups can engage in dialogue and seek to enable a presence with other change agents in communities with restrictive honor or face norms, gaining a foothold to effect a carefully calculated degree of cognitive dissonance without arousing “overwhelming anxiety” about attacks on a received way of life (Churchill 265). Ideally, our book might encourage the coming about of such engaged groups. Elif Shafak, who does not regard a fictional work as a “personal item,” argues in the same vein, seeing that female readers (for instance) “share it with their friends, their relatives, people around them, their boyfriends… It is thanks to this sharing by word-of-mouth that books survive even in countries where democracy is in danger” (Shafak, “Ten”). Shafak’s hope is that her novel Honour will connect readers and “transcend cultural ghettoes” (“Q&A”). A related perception is that of Sema Kaygusuz: “language does not belong merely to those of the same race, but to communities. […] In fact, all of the world’s writers are actually stateless” (“Literature”). Fiction does crucial sociopolitical work in building bridges, while negotiating and shaping differentiated attitudes toward the realities we confront, provoking the question “How should we live?” (see also Mbembe 13).

Between dignity and honor: A troubled heritage

Since we are dealing with values and socio-ethical concepts, literature can help us understand crucial variants of honor: how such a value is not only internal to an individual but also external, so that self-confidence in both honor cultures and face cultures very much depends on the approval of others, of a social collective. This perception is quite different from dignity cultures, which nominally ←20 | 21→uphold a conviction that “each individual at birth possesses an intrinsic value at least theoretically equal to that of every other person” (Ayers 19). At the same time, there is no denying that presumably all cultures are characterized by the “social self” as analyzed by Charles Cooley: in this classic concept there is no sense of “I” without a “correlative sense of you, or he, or they,” submerging the self to some degree in collective perception (182). Indeed, the whole notion of intrinsic value is not without controversy, and would need careful consideration in its own right, beyond what we can actually offer in our context (see Zimmerman and Bradley sections 3 and 4). In most Western European and North American regions, nonetheless, respective value systems profess notions of dignity rather than of honor or face (see also Welsh x), though there are some notable exceptions. Partly, this focus can be explained by the “modernization hypothesis”: “as societies become wealthier, more educated, and capitalistic, they become more individualistic and analytical” (Talhelm et al. 603). Yet there are significant exceptions; at the same time, dignity cultures lack built-in safeguards against the threat of rampant individualism.³¹ In subtle ways, it is fiction that traces a range of such connections.

In studying the variant values, our main focus is on the literature of our time. Yet we are aware that honor and face values have a history as well as a literary heritage which we cannot afford to ignore entirely. Hence in our major sections, as an extension of our core topic, we devote attention also to literary works from earlier periods. Beginning with the focus of Part 1, where many of our main fictional sources originate outside what is commonly known as the “West,” we have made an attempt to give a supplementary and incomplete impression of the ways in which gendered honor has been treated in the development of Western literature, as well as legal codes, citing instances in thematically organized sections. After all, “any history of fiction is simultaneously a history of nonfiction” (Berger 64). We know, however, that both an “easy dismissal” of tradition and its “unquestioned maintenance” are dubious (Mieke Bal, “Zwarte” 140 ff.). Our task requires relating materials to each other, sometimes surprisingly, which are normally considered in quite distinct contexts. ←21 | 22→The overall aim is to offer little more than an introductory glimpse at the range of historical treatments, whether they endorse honor codes or (surely of greater appeal to our present inclinations) turn against them. Authors like Lubna Khalid have briefly spoken of alleged honor killings “around the ancient world,” especially Western cultural or social history, to buttress a claim that “Greeks’ concept of honour wasn’t really different from the [modern] eastern cultures.” Though magazine articles obviously do not claim any scholarly quality, they have a relatively wide circulation. Hence, though we are quite aware of the conceptual risks, for an adequately cross-cultural interface we believe that we cannot wholly avoid at least touching upon this cultural history.³² Researchers have found that there are more substantial links from the distant past to the present: “In the Ancient Near East it was thought (and even still now it is widely thought) that the initiator of any act of adultery was the woman” (Stol 236). Perhaps an authenticated bridge across ages and cultures could even give our topic an added level of relevance.

      Does the literary heritage support the idea that the West harbors dignity cultures? For our immediate purpose, this account can hardly do more than suggest the analytical potential. If an alleged Western dignity-culture ←22 | 23→orientation hardly goes back earlier than the later 18th century, it would form only a thin veneer on the larger cultural memory, perhaps even being only loosely attached. Our “Western” glimpse appears mainly in the “Notes toward ‘perceptions of honor through history.’ ” We hope that at least sometimes it will serve to promote a countertext forming a communicative or interactive double voice, with references to pertinent research sources for further in-depth discussions.

A countertextual imaginary

The “countertext” deserves a little more explanation. Across the landscape of honor, we should re- (and again re-)encounter each literary work from the discursive formation it has in common with others. It is in this sense that what we read is entangled with previous texts, beyond filiative relations. The honor value like few others is hurled (on more than one level) back and forth “between the poles of innocence and

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