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Honor, Face, and Violence. Mine Krause
Читать онлайн.Название Honor, Face, and Violence
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9783631789537
Автор произведения Mine Krause
Жанр Учебная литература
Серия Cross Cultural Communication
Издательство Ingram
Since the so-called ethical turn new attention has been given to Wayne Booth’s dictum that stories are “our major moral teachers” (241). Nie Zhenzhao argues that “[l];iterature teaches by giving illustrations of ethical choices” (Ross 7).11 As we turn our attention to the corpus, we should keep in mind Cao Shunqing’s call for taking into account not only the “homogeneity and affinity” but also “Variation and heterogeneity” (with a capital V) between cultures in studying comparability (xxx). Our chapters will give evidence of such heterogeneity. For these purposes, however, to offer literature as “authentic” material to explain or record a culture and by implication its mainstream would amount to a misunderstanding. It would mean essentializing the culture, treating a fictional artifact as a sociological and ethnographical document rather than as “a commentary on the culture” (Dalvai 282).12 From these considerations, we are encouraged by Pierre Bourdieu’s prominent attention to fiction’s lucid “ways of truth-telling” to analyze the masculinist experience of honor (Masculine 69).
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Marginal or representative conditions? (I)
The composite story told by the fictional works we have found may perhaps appear somewhat marginal rather than representative, a) if one considers a dominant or hegemonic masculinity mainly as a societal ideal in Western advertisements, b) if one finds it theoretically awkward to focus on a gender bias in exploring stigma in non-Western populations, or c) if one foregrounds that women can damage a family’s honor in Western societies as well as elsewhere (see, for instance, Ermers 54, 76, and 192). Yet whether the supposedly marginal is less significant is a matter of perspective.
Thus we can suggest a first way of responding to the query about a representative character of the stories of honor. Fiction “takes the prevalent thought system or social system as its context, but does not reproduce the frame of reference which stabilizes these systems” (Iser 71). It “tends to take as its dominant ‘meaning’ those possibilities that have been neutralized or negated by that system” (Iser 72). Nobel Prize-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s work illuminates this: “[…] the focus of much of Pamuk’s work lies on transgressing the official narratives of Turkish identity enforced by Kemalism and challenging the uncompromising secularism of the republic” (Furlanetto 55). Hence we remain aware of the fact that literature sometimes represents “typical deficits, blind spots, imbalances, deformations, and contradictions within dominant systems of civilizatory power”; it stages and semiotically empowers what is “marginalized, neglected or repressed in the dominant cultural reality system” (Zapf 62–63). Esther Lezra argues in a similar direction, claiming that “[a];s critics, readers and writers, we contribute to the disordering of dominant discourses by recognizing, pointing to and pushing the limits that dominant narratives would impose. We contribute to the remembering of erased and forgotten experiences and voices by pointing to the traces and echoes left by these acts of violence and historical forgetting” (102). Turkish author Sema Kaygusuz justly celebrates writers for whom writing becomes “an existential act,” who have “turned their back on hardline sensitivities” and “attacked the official version of history” (“Literature”).
Marginal or representative conditions? (II)
Yet should we also bear in mind the intersecting possibility that a staged marginality is co-opted in the commodification culture of a profitable book market? This suggests a second response to the query about a representative character of the stories of honor. It reveals a flaw in some of the above arguments: they do not always understand discourse as a Foucaultian event, as one can gather from ←6 | 7→Archaeology of Knowledge (II.1), one which includes speaker, words, hearers, location, language, and dissemination channels. “Who is speaking to whom” is a vital element of meaning: a writer’s positionality, location, or context are always relevant to the represented content (Alcoff 12, 14).13 In our time and not only in Europe the so-called masses, those who are struggling, “know perfectly well, without illusion,” yet “there exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this knowledge” – while the intellectual is “object and instrument” of the system (Foucault, “Intellectuals” 207–08).
Are writers instruments of a power system?
This question requires more attention, at least as a brief extension of our topic focus. Some authors whose works are part of our corpus comment quite explicitly on the experience, among them Turkish writer Ayfer Tunç. According to her own statement, she writes for “qualified readers” of her home country: “Turkey still has […] really powerful ‘qualified readers’ despite its population. In my opinion, this situation shows that our writers still can influence the readers in Turkey and their words create an effect into [sic] people even if they are not majority.”14 Yet what is especially significant in the present context is her experience that “Western writers expect us to write novels that show them more clearly as Westerners, and us more clearly as Easterners; they want us to make them feel happy and secure in this regard” (“Literature”). Western publishers, accordingly, “want stories of abject penury: about lives ruined under the weight of customs and traditions, about the unbreachable chasm between Muslim and Western lifestyles, and tales of ethnic strife” (“Literature”).15