On 3-4 December 2021, “Following the Trace of the Reader from the Ottomans to the Republic” took place over the online platform Zoom for two days with four sessions. Making the opening speech of the program, our Rector Prof. Dr. Mahmut Aydın stated that the Turkish origin of the act of reading means “to invite, to call”. Our Rector Prof. Dr. Mahmut Aydın said, “The words ‘reading, reading, reader’ are still used in different dialects of Anatolia today in the sense of ‘to invite, to call’. So what is this a call to? It is a call to open the door to a world that will increase and enrich the other person. It is a call that offers the opportunity to look at one’s own world with renewed eyes with this new world it opens. I would like to extend my greetings to everyone who listened to this call of reading and came here to the “Following the Reader’s Trace from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic” symposium, where reading and reader culture will be discussed,” he said, concluding his speech by wishing all the participants and the audience a good symposium.
In the first session of the symposium, which focused on the 15th and 16th centuries, Selim Sırrı Kuru from the University of Washington spoke first. After Kuru’s speech titled “The Poet as a Reader: Rumi and Gazel”, the speeches of Tunç Şen and Abdurrahman Atçıl from Columbia and Sabancı University started. After the speech of Şen and Atçıl who spoke on “Ottoman Madrasa Students and Reading Practices: Reflections on the 16th Century Fatih Collection”, Mustafa Altuğ Yayla from Hamburg University talked about “Who Read Lamii Çelebi’s Nefahat Translation? The session ended with Cevat Sucu’s speech titled “Early 15th Century Ottoman Encyclopedism and Its Readers” from Samsun University. After the question and answer session, the session was completed.
The second session started with a speech by Bahadır Sürelli from Sabancı University titled “What Did the Ottomans Read: A Personal Story Magazine from the Seventeenth Century”. Afterward, İpek Hüner-Cora from Boğaziçi University gave a speech titled “Convincing the Reader: Narrator and Reality Anxiety in Ottoman Stories”. The third speaker of this session was Alptuğ Güney from Freie Universität Berlin. Güney made a presentation titled “How to Read Ottoman History in the Early Enlightenment: Dimitri Kantemir’s View of the Ottoman Historical Sources as a Reader (1673-1723)”. Ercan Akyol from Universität Wien was the last speaker of this session with his speech titled “The Poet’s Library, Selection of the Academy: Looking at the Ottoman Literary Canon Through Readership”. After the question and answer session, the session was completed.
The first session of the second day of the symposium, which focuses on the 19th century, started with a speech titled Günil Ayaydın-Cebe from Nevşehir Hacı Bektaş Veli University: “Muhaberat-ı Aleniye: Periodical Reading in the Nineteenth Century”. Emrah Pelvanoğlu from Yedipe University made the second presentation of this session with his speech titled “Kemalites: A ‘Reader’s Congregation’ from the Long 19th Century”. Atiye Gülfer-Gündoğdu from Universität zu Köln was the next speaker with her presentation titled “The Tale of Ahmet Mithat Efendi and Husband and Wife in the Context of Questioning the Reading Habits of the Reader”. The last speaker of this session was Elif Sezer-Aydınli, with her speech from Freia Universität Berlin titled “‘Brothers, Let’s Leave an Edge Here’: Tracing Coffee Shop Readers on the Sidelines in 19th Century Istanbul”.
The fourth panel of the second day, which focused on 20th-century studies, started with Fatih Altuğ’s speech entitled “The Figure of the Reader in the Texts of Late Ottoman Women Writers”. The second speaker from Universität zu Köln, Servet Gündoğdu, delivered a speech titled “From Symbol to Image: The Problem of the Reader in Turkish Poetry Criticism of the Twentieth Century”. Esra Akbulak from our department, “Speaking for the Reader: How Was the 1950 Generation Criticized?” He became the third speaker of this session with his speech entitled. Our department research assistant, Kaan Kurt, was the last speaker of this session with his study titled “The Imagination of the Ideal Reader in Modern Turkish Poetry”.
After the question and answer session and a general evaluation of the symposium, a closing speech was made and the symposium ended.
