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“I strongly believe that I’m representing the truth about the repression of the woman in Turkey – and in an honest way” (Bednarz and Pieper).

26 As Longo argues from the perspective of sociology, agreeing with Jerome Bruner, literary narrative exemplifies singular happenings which assume “the features of a more general type,” with events and actors “in their emblematic dimension” so that the description is “useful to explain other contexts and actions” (50).

27 From Magona’s following statement it becomes clear that she is mainly writing for a White audience: “I am a black woman and I am writing from a black woman’s perspective. The gatekeepers to publication are white people. Yet if a white person writes about black people, who will pick up the errors?” (Salo).

28 See also Steppat and Krause. As for teleopoiesis with its evoking of both completion and distance, as re-imagined by Spivak, it would require working through the Other, aiming toward a future with and through that distant Other, while retaining a certain doubt whether the gap can actually be bridged. If that should involve a perceived spreading of Western value notions, the prospect might possibly be feared to convert the addressee “en refoulé” (Derrida, Politiques 198).

29 Attridge reminds us that “the mere fact of a text’s changing the subject who reads it does not signal an inventive work and a creative reading,” as the advertising industry’s products also rely on texts to change recipients’ behavior (Singularity 85). It is “creative reading” of inventive works that is able to “introduce into the culture the hitherto unthinkable” (85).

30 Khalid reports the advice of Mufti Naeem Ashraf from Karachi: “Religious scholars can tell their congregation that Islam forbids killing a human being. […] NGOs should move forward and work with ulema.”

31 See Baker et al. on an “inherently individualistic component of family honor” and a shift of the enforcement role “from natal family members to individual men” (174); also: the individual Western man is “both judge and executioner” (179). Négar Djavadi in Désorientale presents the West as “bereft of a closer, vital sense of unmediated community”; Western democracies do not “provide the humanity that binds one individual life to another, that sustains an individual and a community through private or shared trauma” (Provata-Carlone).

32 For such a context, see also for instance the sketchy surveys by Goldstein in 2002 (29) or Muhammad in 2010 (16–18) or Kiener in 2011. As the secondary sources, including scholarly analyses, show not only considerable divergence but sometimes also dubious statements, we believe it is necessary to take pains to be as meticulous (or even fussy) as possible in identifying authentic records for such a highly sensitive subject. Fiske and Rai in 2015, for instance, assert that the Trojan War in The Iliad “should conclude in an honor killing” in light of “the prescribed violence by Menelaus against Helen” (88), yet this lacks evidence unless one consults later sources in various genres. In another instance, according to Taylor in 2008 the theme of wife killing in Spanish drama “first came to prominence” in 1631 (2), yet there are notable earlier dramas. Other such cases can be easily found. We need to test the evidence for James Bowman’s hypothesis that “even in classical times, I believe, the Western honor culture showed signs of its later instability and collapse” (45). We should also note the assessment that “considering the history of Roman rape laws helps put into context the rape laws of other modern legal systems which might still be primarily based in the honor/shame system and its relation to sexual gender roles” (Nguyen 112). What is more, Churchill (264–71) suggests promoting an alternative model of masculinity based on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Book 4 and Marcus Aurelius’s stoic Meditations. Yet we do not wish to forget that “[t];he kind of critique that a politically alert cultural analysis can usefully bring to bear on traditions cannot cleanly disentangle itself from the cultural fabric in which the critique is embedded” (Bal, “Zwarte” 140–41; Travelling 246).

33 For Deleuze, whom Berger does not mention but whose concept becomes useful for our purposes, a simulacrum is “that which overturns all copies by also overturning the models”; it “seizes upon a constituent disparity in the thing from which it strips the rank of model,” as “the instance which includes a difference within itself” (xx, 67, 69). It implicates “word” in language with “action = x in history” (Deleuze 299), hence for us the impact of extratextual coordinates.

34 To illustrate: when Cao Xueqin has a major woman character in Story of the Stone at the moment of death reflect “honor and disgrace follow each other in an unending cycle,” or when Khaled Hosseini (as we will see) shows us how it comes about that “Nana’s own father disowned her,” in each case the signifying network and its narrative conditions call for tracking discursive agendas, be they parallel or competing, which they disclose – beyond what Berger calls “mischief” within the immediate sign structure.

35 In Singularity Derek Attridge argues that literature cannot serve as an instrument for any predetermined end, be it political or moral, “without at the same time challenging the basis of instrumentality itself” (13). As an event, in terms of its reading a literary work presents an “unprecedented, hitherto unimaginable disposition of cultural materials” (63). Hence reading as a creative process is or ought to be open to “surprise and wonder” of diverse kinds (83), an expectation which may owe something to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Life is a series of surprises” (413) or “In the thought of genius there is always a surprise; and the moral sentiment is well called ‘the newness,’ for it is never other” (483). In Work, significantly for us, Attridge is attentive to “responsible reading across cultures” (216): the value of “opening up to new possibilities” of a culture, enabling multiple readings (218). Literature is “characterized by a challenge to the habits and norms by which the reader relates to the world,” dislocating the reader, and “responsible” textual instrumentality will not seek to glide over a work’s challenge (121). Hence of value is “that which is unencounterable, given the present state of the encountering mind or culture” (55).

      Mariano Longo, too, from the viewpoint of social science emphasizes fictional narrative’s ability to provide “new perspectives from which to observe and understand reality” (51, similarly 33). This is worth keeping in mind whenever we are tempted to read mainly for confirmation of our own stereotypes regarding honor and face cultures.

      In its proximity to Levinassian otherness, this post-theoretical highlighting of responsible reading enables us to share the experience which, for instance, Khaled Hosseini has articulated about literature: it will “allow you to climb over the wall of yourself”; Kimberly Collins affirms that his work can “jar our previous impressions” (Collins). There are significant cases: the fairly dominant but nonetheless endearing patriarchal figure of Baba in The Kite Runner does not simply support a stereotype. As Moira Macdonald describes it, Elif Shafak’s Bastard “extends beyond its pages into startling real-life news.” The father figures in Yasmina Khadra’s Ce que le jour doit à la nuit and also in Orhan Pamuk’s The House of Silence are not merely dominantly masculine, as befitting a patriarchal structure, but are also described in their weak moments. In Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’Enfant de Sable we likewise find features which a reader may not have expected; we gain a strong impression of the pressure on a husband because his wife does not give birth to a son. Chen Xunwu reads Cao’s Story of the Stone in terms of contingency, the opportunities created by “openness,

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