"Imaginary travel(s) as a discursive strategy. The case of Ahmet Mithat and Ottoman constructions of Europe" (original) (raw)

Abstract

The Ottoman-Turkish author Ahmet Mithat (1844–1912) wrote a great deal of travel novels in which the protagonists travel through the whole world, and many novels and stories that are set in Europe, even before he ever went there himself. While writing these novels he concentrates on different kinds of travel and discusses them either in the prefaces, declaring his arguments as the author Ahmet Mithat, or lets the characters in those novels discuss the issue among themselves. The ‘different kinds of travel’ are those mental travels done while thinking or reading as well as the real, physical ones done by the author himself. These discussions about different kinds of travel is to be perceived within a new perspective after reading Ahmet Mithat’s Avrupa’da Bir Cevelan (‘A Stroll through Europe’ 1889/90), the travelogue he wrote after his own trip to Europe. It is possible to analyze how Ahmet Mithat, while referring to his previous fictional travels in Avrupa’da Bir Cevelan, uses them as a discursive strategy to present himself as the expert on Europe and travel. What is to be analyzed in this article is how Ahmet Mithat constructs an authoritative discourse on Europe by mentioning the textual information gathered through reading, his imaginary world, which prepared him for his reallife trip, and the experiences and observations he made during this voyage. The main goal of the article is first to classify and define these different kinds of travel, namely mental travel, which includes imaginary and literary voyages, and the real journey. Having established this classification, by using the author’s own definitions from his books, the article aims to show the formation of the abovementioned authoritative discourse. Ahmet Mithat’s overconfident discourse on Europe is a product of the dialogue between the above mentioned three kinds of travel. The author, as the article tries to show, intentionally uses this constant dialogue to construct a textual support for his imagined privileged position. Keywords: Ahmet Mithat, Avrupa’da Bir Cevelan, travel writing, mental travel, Occidentalism.

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